Senior Data Scientist - Authentication

About the role

WHY DATA SCIENCE & ANALYTICS?

The Data Science & Analytics organization's mission is to increase our speed, frequency and acumen of making decisions at scale by instilling a data- influenced approach to building products. We cover a wide area of the data spectrum including analytical data engineering, product analytics, experimentation, causal inference, statistical modeling and machine learning. Aligned and partnering with product verticals, we use this extensive tool belt to discover new opportunities and unmet use cases, influence and shape the product roadmap and prioritization, build data products and measure impact on our community of players and developers.

WHY AUTHENTICATION & SECURITY?

Authentication & Security sits at the intersection of trust, product, and growth. The team builds the systems that allow users to sign in, recover, and protect their accounts with confidence, while defending the platform against account takeovers, credential abuse, and fraud at massive scale. This role is an opportunity to shape a high-stakes product area where small changes in friction or protection can meaningfully affect sign-ups and user frequency. You will act as a strategic leader, helping make authentication and account- recovery flows more seamless and secure while strengthening our systems against abuse.

You Will:

• Shape Authentication & Security roadmaps with strategic data science guidance across account creation, login, account recovery, and account protection features.
• Identify and size the highest-impact levers to improve authentication success rates, reduce account takeover rates, and minimize unnecessary user friction.
• Design and evaluate feature experiments across sign-up, login, and account-recovery funnels.
• Quantify tradeoffs between security friction and user protection, and assess how each influences downstream engagement and retention.
• Develop evaluation metrics and ground-truth labeling strategies to strengthen our account security detection models.
• Partner with Product, Engineering, Policy, Legal, and UX Research to turn ambiguous problems into clear decisions.
• Translate friction points in the authentication and account-recovery journey into actionable product recommendations.
• Communicate insights to leadership and cross-functional partners to drive prioritization and tradeoff decisions.

You Have:

• 5+ years of industry experience in data science, economics, analytics, or machine learning engineering
• 2+ years of experience using scripting languages (Python, R), and big data query/processing languages and tools such as SQL, Hive, Spark, and Airflow
• Knowledge of ML and Deep Learning either via formal training or industry experience
• Ability to apply creative first-principles reasoning to solve ambiguous problems
• Experience developing large-scale safety or moderation systems as well as experience with content platforms, specifically user-generated content
• Advanced Degree and/or PhD in Statistics, Computer Science, Physics, Applied Math, Economics, or other related quantitative fields