Senior Data Scientist

About impact.com

impact.com is the world’s leading commerce partnership marketing platform, transforming the way businesses grow by enabling them to discover, manage, and scale partnerships across the entire customer journey. From affiliates and influencers to content publishers, brand ambassadors, and customer advocates, impact.com empowers brands to drive trusted, performance‑based growth through authentic relationships. Its award‑winning products - Performance (affiliate), Creator (influencer), and Advocate (customer referral) - unify every type of partner into one integrated platform. As consumers increasingly rely on recommendations from people and communities they trust, impact.com helps brands show up where it matters most. Today, over 5,000 global brands - including Walmart, Uber, Shopify, Lenovo, L’Oréal, and Fanatics - rely on impact.com to power more than 350,000 partnerships that deliver measurable business results.

Your Role at impact.com

We are looking for a Senior Data Scientist to contribute to enhancing our measurement capabilities across Impact’s dynamic partnership marketing ecosystem. In this role, you will lead modeling research across a variety of measurement initiatives—including, but not limited to, attribution, identity resolution, and tracking quality—while simultaneously owning the pipelines supporting end‑to‑end measurement and incrementality testing.

This is a high‑impact individual contributor role. You will drive the measurement strategy for key measurement initiatives, designing the experiments to quantify the expected lift of attribution‑enhancing projects and the robustness of our underlying identity graph and tracking pipelines. You will act as the bridge between technical integrity and business value for our measurement outcomes.

You’ll also serve as Impact's technical counterpart with external identity and measurement partners. You will design and run structured POCs, evaluate vendor solutions rigorously, and produce data‑driven recommendations on build‑vs‑buy decisions that shape the long‑term identity strategy.

What You’ll Do

• Innovate & Modernize: Analyze current measurement solutions to identify systemic weaknesses and opportunities for improvement. Use cutting‑edge methods in ML, graph networks, and AI to develop next‑generation approaches.
• Pipeline Development & Evaluation: Develop robust testing environments to evaluate new models, independently or in partnership with Data Engineering. Build proactive monitoring and SLOs for system health. Own deployment, testing, and monitoring.
• Impact: Implement incremental enhancements to existing processes. Ensure that changes to our algorithms produce verifiable, measurable improvement in business metrics. Measure impact rigorously and communicate results to stakeholders.
• Vendor Strategy: Serve as the technical owner for third‑party identity partner evaluations, designing structured POCs that move beyond "demo‑ware" to stress‑test claims against real data.
• Stakeholder Communication: Translate complex findings into actionable narratives for Product, Engineering, and leadership.
• Strategic Initiatives: Use technical expertise to assist in driving the technical measurement strategy for high‑priority projects in collaboration with other teams and leadership.

What You Bring

• Experience: 5+ years of total experience, with significant, hands‑on expertise in data‑driven research and development.
• Attribution & Measurement: Proven track record in designing incrementality experiments, A/B testing, and assessing the impact of new initiatives.
• Engineering Rigor: Proven ability to build production‑grade pipelines. Fluent in Python/SQL and comfortable owning code from research through to production deployment.
• Analytical Communication: Ability to articulate complex tradeoffs (e.g., graph accuracy vs. latency or incrementality vs. scale) to stakeholders who need to make build‑vs‑buy decisions.
• Education: Bachelor's in a quantitative field (CS, Statistics, Math, Engineering, or similar); Master's/PhD preferred, or equivalent work experience

Nice To Have

• Familiarity with ML‑based entity resolution approaches: blocking strategies, embedding‑based similarity, probabilistic matching, and hierarchical clustering.
• Experience with graph databases and graph analytics (Neo4j, Spanner, PuppyGraph, NetworkX, or similar) applied to identity or entity data.
• Deep understanding of multi‑touch attribution (MTA) and cross‑channel measurement.
• Experience with device fingerprinting, cross‑device identity, or cookie‑less identity resolution approaches.
• Experience evaluating third‑party identity resolution or data enrichment vendors; familiarity with the external identity and measurement partner landscape.
• Exposure to affiliate marketing, ad tech, or performance marketing data environments and the identity challenges specific to those ecosystems.
• Familiarity with GCP tools (BigQuery, Vertex AI, Dataflow, Cloud Run) and/or Databricks/Spark for large‑scale data processing.
• Knowledge of privacy‑preserving identity techniques (differential privacy, hashing, clean rooms) and their implications for measurement.

What Sets You Apart

• Clear under complexity. You can articulate what our measurement systems represent, where they break down, and what fixing them is worth, whether to an engineer, a product manager, or a senior leader.
• Ownership mindset. You treat our measurement systems like they’re yours. You don't wait to be asked to find the next problem; you're already looking.
• Innate curiosity. You stay current on the external landscape for identity resolution, data enrichment, and measurement vendors. You bring relevant developments to the team proactively.
• Detective instincts. You love hunting bad data. You don't accept anomalies at face value: you dig until you understand the root cause, whether it's a pipeline bug, a vendor data issue, or a fundamental schema flaw.
• Research‑to‑production fluency. You move comfortably between prototyping new resolution techniques and shipping them into a production pipeline. You know what "production ready" means and hold yourself to that standard.
• Vendor skepticism. When evaluating external solutions, you design rigorous tests, ask hard questions, and let data, not demos, drive your recommendation.

Salary Range: $130,000 - $142,000 per year, plus eligible to receive a Restricted Stock Unit (RSU) grant and additional variable annual bonus contingent on Company performance. This is the pay range the Company believes is equitable for this position at the time of this posting. Consistent with applicable law, compensation will be determined based on the skills, qualifications, and experience of the applicant along with the requirements of the position, and the Company reserves the right to modify this pay range at any time.

Benefits and Perks

At impact.com, we believe that when you’re happy and fulfilled, you do your best work. That’s why we’ve built a benefits package that supports your well‑being, growth, and work‑life balance.

• Medical, Dental, and Vision insurance
• Office‑only catered lunch every Thursday, a healthy snack bar, and great coffee to keep you fueled
• Flexible spending accounts and 401(k)
• Flexible Working: Our Responsible PTO policy means you can take the time off you need to rest and recharge. We're committed to a positive work‑life balance and provide a flexible environment that allows you to be happy and fulfilled in both your career and your personal life.
• Health and Wellness: Your well‑being is a priority. Our mental health and wellness benefit includes up to 12 fully covered therapy/coaching sessions per year, with additional dependent coverage. We also offer a monthly gym reimbursement policy to support your physical health.
• A Stake in Our Growth: We offer Restricted Stock Units (RSUs) as part of our total compensation, giving you a stake in the company's growth with a 3‑year vesting schedule, pending Board approval.
• Investing in Your Growth: We’re committed to your continuous learning. Take advantage of our free Coursera subscription and our PXA courses.
• Parental Support: We offer a generous parental leave policy, 26 weeks of fully paid leave for the primary caregiver and 13 weeks fully paid leave for the secondary caregiver.
• Technology Financial Support: We provide a technology stipend to help you set up your home office and a monthly allowance to cover your internet expenses.

impact.com is proud to be an equal‑opportunity workplace. All employees and applicants for employment shall be given fair treatment and equal employment opportunity regardless of their race, ethnicity or ancestry, color or caste, religion or belief, age, sex (including gender identity, gender reassignment, sexual orientation, pregnancy/maternity), national origin, weight, neurodivergence, disability, marital and civil partnership status, caregiving status, veteran status, genetic information, political affiliation, or other prohibited non‑merit factors.

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