Data Scientist III

Job Title

Data Scientist III

Job Details

• Job #: 3021687
• Location: Burbank, CA - Hybrid
• Contract Duration: 10 months
• Pay Rate: $84.37/hr

Overview

We’re looking for a Senior Data Scientist with a strong foundation in predictive modeling, clustering, and statistical analysis. This role combines hands‑on machine learning with close collaboration across business and product teams to build production‑ready models that forecast content performance and reveal content insights. The ideal candidate is fluent in modern MLOps tools, proactively explores new approaches, and iterates based on user feedback to ensure solutions are interpretable, trusted, and adopted across the organization. Experience in the media/entertainment industry or other creative industries is a strong advantage. Candidates should have experience building DS solutions that support human judgment, optimizing for results beyond purely accuracy, such as enriching insights and discussions.

Responsibilities

• Build and iterate on predictive models to project content performance.
• Test different model types (e.g., gradient boosting, regression) and iterate based on accuracy and user interpretability needs.
• Complete model experiments to validate hypotheses.
• Proactively identify opportunities to improve performance and contribute to model development roadmap.
• Explore and segment content types using clustering, principal component analysis, and other unsupervised methods to identify patterns in performance drivers.
• Experiment with GenAI to enrich data (e.g., augmenting metadata tagging or generating synthetic attributes).
• Collaborate with business users to refine models and drive adoption: infuse models with domain expertise, present early outputs, solicit feedback, identify gaps, and adapt model design for interpretability and usability.
• Maintain and monitor models: work with ML Engineers to deploy models in production, including API endpoints, and establish ML pipelines.
• Contribute to shared libraries and modeling best practices across the data science team.
• Partner with product and platform teams to deliver impact: participate in design and implementation of new products embedding data science models and facilitate technical discussions with data architects and engineers.

Requirements

• Proven experience as a Data Scientist with 4+ years.
• Strong programming skills in Python and common ML libraries (scikit‑learn, XGBoost, pandas).
• Experience with AWS tools, especially SageMaker, or equivalent cloud‑based ML environments.
• Familiarity with SQL, clustering, dimensionality reduction techniques.
• Exposure to generative AI models (LLMs, diffusion models) and interest in applying them to real‑world data problems.
• Strong communication skills and ability to translate data science work into business value.
• Curiosity and capability to work in an experimental stage of development to test hypotheses.
• Experience building predictive models, especially with limited sample sizes, and optimizing for interpretability and trust.

Preferred

• Experience in media & entertainment industry.
• SQL fluency.

Soft Skills

• Curiosity and experimental mindset.
• Ability to translate data science into business value.
• Strong communication skills.

Technology Requirements

• Python, scikit‑learn, XGBoost, pandas.
• AWS SageMaker or equivalent cloud ML environment.
• Experience with generative AI models.
• Understanding of clustering and dimensionality reduction techniques.

Equal Opportunity Employer

Apex Systems is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate or allow discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, creed, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, or related medical conditions), age, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, genetic information, registered domestic partner status, marital status, disability, status as a crime victim, protected veteran status, political affiliation, union membership, or any other characteristic protected by law. Apex will consider qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with the requirements of applicable law.