Staff Data Scientist

Job Description

Job Description

Overview:

As the Staff Data Scientist for Conversation Intelligence, you will apply natural language processing and large language models to the conversations at the heart of Nerdy's business. You will design the methods that turn unstructured speech and text into reliable, measurable signals, build and rigorously evaluate LLM-based systems, and take models from research to production on a modern lakehouse stack. You will own your problem area end to end and be accountable for the business outcomes your work moves, leveraging AI to accelerate development, evaluation, and operations.

About Nerdy:

At Nerdy (NYSE: NRDY) - the company behind Varsity Tutors - we’re redrawing the blueprint of learning. Our Live + AI™ platform fuses real-time human expertise with proprietary generative-AI systems, setting a new bar for measurable academic impact at global scale.

We recruit the kind of technologists and operators you’d bet on as solo founders - people who turn ambiguous problems into shipping code, iterate faster than markets move, and compound their advantage with every data point. In an era where great employees can deliver 10-times the leverage of the merely good, we back those who play to win.

Fortune favors the bold. Join us.

How we compete:

• AI-Native at every level From the CEO to day-one hires, everyone builds and ships with generative AI. If you’re not wielding AI, you’re not done.
• Entrepreneurial velocity Move at founder speed, prototype in hours, and measure in real user outcomes. Slow teams die.
• Free-market rigor Ideas rise or fall on merit and results - no committees, no politics, no cap on upside.
• Full-stack ownership You design, build, and run what you ship; accountability is a feature, not a bug.
• Reward for contribution Pay rises with impact, not years. Outstanding results earn outsized rewards. We evaluate both what you achieve and how you achieve it: living our leadership principles and using AI effectively are formally measured and rewarded.
• Relentless exploration Push the frontier of generative AI in live learning and - because only the paranoid survive - questioning every legacy assumption along the way.
• Is Apolitical You stay focused on mission-aligned outcomes, not distractions or unrelated causes.

If you’re a technically minded builder who thrives on open competition, personal responsibility, and the chance to redefine how the world learns - while continually stretching the limits of what generative AI can do - come do the most ambitious and rewarding work of your career here. Learn more at nerdy.com.

Nerdy’s shareholder letters below explain our latest products and strategy:

• Q2-2026 Shareholder Letter
• Q1-2026 Shareholder Letter
• Q4-2025 Shareholder Letter

Qualifications:

• Master’s degree in Computer Science, Statistics, Mathematics, Computational Linguistics, or a related quantitative field is required; a PhD is preferred.
• 6+ years applying data science or machine learning to real products, including at least one system you took from concept to production and kept in use.
• Expertise in natural language processing and large language models: prompt design, structured extraction, fine-tuning or retrieval where it pays off, and the judgment to know when a simpler model wins.
• Hands-on experience evaluating LLM systems: reference datasets, rubric design, model-assisted review calibrated against human reviewers, inter-rater agreement, and regression testing whenever prompts or models change.
• Strong Python (pandas, scikit-learn, PyTorch or similar) and expert SQL on a modern warehouse or lakehouse. We run Starburst Galaxy (Trino) on Iceberg with dbt Cloud; Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, or Athena experience transfers.
• Experience with the major LLM APIs (Anthropic Claude, OpenAI, or similar) and the tooling around them, including cost, latency, and privacy constraints at production volume.
• Comfortable with speech-to-text output and messy human-generated text: speaker attribution, long-context summarization, PII handling, and the errors transcription introduces.
• Experimentation and causal inference skills sufficient to connect a model-driven change to a business outcome, not just a model metric.
• Ability to explain findings to non-technical business leaders in their terms, and to turn their questions into measurable definitions.
• Git-based development, code review, and CI/CD habits; you write code other people can run and maintain.
• Experienced with AI-native tools that enhance productivity and speed (e.g., Cursor, Make, Supabase, Netlify, Claude Code, n8n, Firecrawl, ChatGPT, Grok, Bolt, Vercel, etc).
• Alignment with Nerdy’s apolitical, mission-focused culture.

Responsibilities:

• Conversation modeling: Apply NLP and large language models to call, chat, and session transcripts to extract structured, reliable signals from unstructured speech and text.
• Measurement design: Work with business partners to define what good looks like in a conversation, and translate those definitions into validated, measurable metrics.
• LLM evaluation: Build the evaluation methods, including reference datasets, rubrics, and model-assisted and human review, that establish whether an LLM-based system is accurate, consistent, and safe to rely on, and that catch regressions when models or prompts change.
• Modeling and analysis: Build classification, extraction, scoring, and summarization models, and the analyses that connect conversation behavior to business outcomes such as conversion, resolution, and retention.
• Production: Take models from prototype to production with engineering partners, with monitoring and retraining so they stay reliable in use.
• Experimentation: Design and analyze experiments that attribute business impact to changes informed by your models.
• Data foundations: Partner with Data Engineering and Analytics Engineering to make transcripts, labels, and model outputs available in the lakehouse (Starburst, dbt, Supabase) as governed, reusable tables.
• Communication: Present findings and recommendations to business and technical leaders in their language, with the evidence behind them.
• AI-enabled workflows: Use AI for code generation and review, experiment analysis, transcript exploration, and documentation, operating within privacy and security guardrails.

Unleash Your Potential at Nerdy:

At Nerdy, you'll earn your success through meritocracy and exceptional outcomes. Our benefits reward performance and initiative:

• Competitive USD-Benchmarked Compensation: Earn a market-leading rate set in U.S. dollars, paid to you in local currency.
• 100% Remote (Home Country Only): Work from anywhere in your home country—no relocation required, no borders crossed.
• Flexible Time Off: Our flexible PTO lets you recharge on your own terms and when you need it the most.
• Local Holiday Pay: We honor your nation’s official holidays with paid time off—celebrate what matters to you.
• Continuous Learning: Get a free, all-inclusive learning membership for you and your household—including 1-on-1 tutoring hours, unlimited on-demand classes, and access to our full suite of learning products and services.
• Supercharge with AI: Gain exclusive access to cutting-edge AI tools that boost your productivity, making you feel almost super-human (cape not included).
• Feedback-Rich, Collaborative Culture: Tap into regular training, peer reviews, and a team that treats every team member as a vital collaborator and owner in our success.
• Make a Global Impact: Your expertise fuels an innovative platform used by learners around the world—be part of something transformative.

The Bottom Line:

If you're driven by impact, energized by ownership, and excited to help shape what’s next, you’ll thrive here. We move fast, think big, and reward those who deliver. This isn’t a traditional corporate environment - it’s a place to do the most meaningful work of your career.