Director - Data Science, Customer Experience

Hard Rock Digital•United States, FL

About The Position

Hard Rock Digital is building an online sportsbook, casino, and social gaming company. The Director, Data Science, Customer Experience will lead the science behind how the company engages Hard Rock Bet customers after signup. Customer experience is driven by CRM messages, offers, and journeys spanning onboarding, engagement, cross-sell, retention, and reactivation. The role owns the strategy, modeling, delivery, and production health of CRM decisioning models, including propensity and uplift models, next-best-action and offer optimization, send-time and channel decisioning, and experimentation. The director will lead data scientists and applied AI engineers and partner with CRM, VIP, Marketing, Data Engineering, Applied AI Engineering, Finance, and AI Ops & Observability to shift campaigns from rules-based to model-driven and increasingly automated decisioning. Success is measured through retention, engagement, cross-sell, and incremental revenue, while meeting responsible gaming commitments and state regulations.

Requirements

At least 8 years of experience in data science or machine learning.
At least 3 years leading data scientists or ML engineers and shipping production models.
Deep, hands-on expertise in CRM and lifecycle science, including propensity, churn, uplift, next-best-action, offer and bonus optimization, and send-time and channel optimization.
Strong foundations in experimentation and causal inference, including holdout design, power analysis, variance reduction, and incrementality measurement.
Experience applying LLMs and AI agents to marketing operations, such as campaign generation, audience building, automated QA, and journey orchestration.
Familiarity with real-time machine learning in production, including feature pipelines, low-latency scoring, model monitoring, and retraining; AWS experience is preferred.
Ability to build and scale a team through hiring, coaching, performance management, and succession planning.
Ability to translate ambiguous CRM and marketing problems into a prioritized science roadmap and communicate trade-offs to executives.
Master's or PhD in a quantitative field, or equivalent experience.

Nice To Haves

Experience in online gaming, sports betting, fintech, or another high-frequency consumer business.
Experience with recommendation and personalization systems that extend CRM decisioning into the product.
Familiarity with Braze, Amplitude, Segment, Snowflake, dbt, Airflow, AWS SageMaker, Bedrock, or equivalent tools.
Experience with multi-objective optimization that balances revenue, engagement, and customer wellbeing.

Responsibilities

Own the Customer Experience science roadmap and KPIs end to end, including strategy, modeling, delivery, and production health for CRM decisioning models.
Lead, grow, and develop a team of data scientists and applied AI engineers; set scientific standards and foster a culture of delivering measurable outcomes.
Partner with CRM and VIP teams on next-best-action, offer and bonus targeting, send-time and channel optimization, and lifecycle journeys.
Drive automation of CRM operations using AI agents and LLM workflows in partnership with Applied AI Engineering.
Partner with Marketing and Finance to measure the incremental impact of CRM and bonus spend and reconcile it to the P&L.
Build responsible gaming and compliance guardrails into models, including exclusion logic, state-specific rules, and safe targeting constraints.
Own model monitoring, drift detection, and retraining for the pillar in partnership with AI Ops & Observability.
Report pillar KPIs monthly to leadership and participate in annual talent and headcount planning.