Founding Data Scientist

Sela AI•San Francisco, CA

15h•$180,000 - $250,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Sela is the market-leading AI voice agent for mortgage lenders. Founded in 2024, we’ve grown like crazy (~$0->13M in 20 months), and currently count 5 of the 10 largest independent mortgage banks in the U.S. as enterprise customers. If we’re successful, the cost of owning a home in the US will become ~1% cheaper. We’ve raised $21M across our Seed and Series A from top investors. Around 1% of the U.S. labor force works in phone sales, representing roughly $100B of annual salary, and the industry is poised at the brink of complete disruption. We are at the cutting edge of this economic transformation, one of the first companies creating real, durable economic value through applied AI. Buying a house is the largest financial decision most people make in their lives, and homeownership is tied to many other purchases, including life insurance, homeowners insurance, alarm systems, home renovations, solar panels, and more. By owning the mortgage vertical, we will own the relationship with the consumer, allowing us to serve as the essential AI infrastructure for high consideration consumer sales.

Requirements

4+ years of experience in data science, machine learning, experimentation, or a closely related field.
Strong statistical foundations and experience designing and analyzing experiments.
Strong Python and SQL skills and the ability to work with very large datasets.
Ability to take an ambiguous problem, figure out what to measure, and turn the results into actionable recommendations.
Strong technical judgment and the ability to work closely with engineers on experimentation systems.
High agency and the ability to operate without an established playbook.

Nice To Haves

Experience designing experimentation or optimization systems at scale.
Experience with causal inference, personalization, ranking, or recommendation systems.
Experience working with LLMs, speech, or conversational data.
Experience at a fast-growing startup or as an early data science hire.

Responsibilities

Help us build the top-performing AI sales agent in the world.
Analyze hundreds of millions of calls to understand what drives better sales outcomes.
Design and run experiments across every part of the sales call — what we say, how we say it, when we call, and more.
Build models that help us personalize and optimize calls for each lead.
Turn large, complex datasets into recommendations that directly improve our AI agents.
Partner closely with engineering to build a robust, scalable, and future-proof experimentation framework.