Principal, Data Scientist - at San Francisco, California

Principal Data Scientist

New York, NY: $132,000 - $264,000/yr San Francisco, CA: $143,000 - $286,000/yr Regular/ Permanent Salaried

Position Summary: As a Principal Data Scientist, you will lead the design and delivery of machine learning solutions that power personalization and ad targeting across VIZIO. You'll own complex, ambiguous problems end to end-translating product and customer needs into scalable ML models and iterating them through rigorous evaluation and experimentation. You will work closely with Product and Engineering partners to influence direction, navigate technical tradeoffs, and advance long-term ML strategy. You will set the technical standard for modeling and experimentation, contribute hands-on advanced deep learning models at scale, and mentor other data scientists with a focus on quality and impact.

What You'll Do:

• Tackle ambiguous, high-impact problems by translating product and business questions into well-scoped ML and data science work.
• Build, evaluate, and iterate on advanced deep learning models for personalization and recommendation.
• Design and apply rigorous offline metrics and online experimentation frameworks to measure model and system performance.
• Partner closely with Product and Engineering to align on scope, tradeoffs, and execution across multiple teams.
• Help define best practices for modeling, experimentation, and ML development, with a focus on robustness and maintainability.
• Provide technical mentorship and guidance to other data scientists through reviews, collaboration, and hands-on problem solving.

What You'll Bring:

• Extensive experience designing, training, and deploying machine learning models for real-world systems, particularly in personalization, recommendation, ranking, or targeting.
• Deep technical foundations in machine learning and statistics, including experience with representation learning, deep learning architectures, optimization, and model evaluation.
• Production Python experience, comfortable with distributed data tools such as PySpark and expertise in modern ML frameworks (e.g. PyTorch, JAX, etc.). You are opinionated about model design, training workflows, and evaluation/experimentation strategies.
• Comfortable operating in ambiguous, technically complex problem spaces, taking ownership from initial formulation through deployment and iteration.
• Enjoy raising the technical bar through mentorship, design reviews, and hands-on collaboration with other data scientists.

At VIZIO, we value candidates with a background in creating inclusive digital experiences, demonstrating knowledge in implementing Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 AA standards, assistive technologies, and integrating digital accessibility seamlessly. The ideal candidate would have knowledge of accessibility best practices and join us as we continue to create accessible products and services following VIZIO's accessibility standards and guidelines for supporting an inclusive culture.