Principal Data Scientist

Yoodli•Seattle, WA

20d•Hybrid

About The Position

Yoodli is hiring its most senior data scientist to own the data function end to end, including infrastructure, standards, and evidence-based decision-making. The principal-level role will define and validate how the company measures measurable skills development for a product powered by LLMs, advise leadership on decisions, help product teams diagnose metrics, and support customers in quantifying their impact with Yoodli. The position begins without a team, but may grow to include building one. It is hybrid and requires being based in the Greater Seattle Area, with on-site work in the Seattle office Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday.

Requirements

At least 8 years in data science, product analytics, or a closely related field, including experience as the most senior data professional for a product or business line.
Deep expertise in SQL and Python and the ability to ship production-grade analytical code.
A track record of running an experimentation program, including power analysis, sequential testing, guardrail metrics, and the discipline to report null results.
Experience evaluating LLMs or other generative systems, including building evaluation sets, designing rubrics, and measuring quality without clean ground truth.
Fluency with modern data stacks such as dbt, Snowflake, and BigQuery, and BI tools such as Looker, Mode, Hex, or similar.
Demonstrated ability to influence product strategy at the executive level, with examples of decisions changed by analysis.
Excellent communication skills and the ability to provide clear thinking amid differing opinions.
Ability to work on-site at the Seattle, Washington office on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday; must be based in the Greater Seattle Area.

Nice To Haves

Experience in speech analytics, NLP, or conversational AI.
Experience with embedded or customer-facing analytics.
Early-stage startup experience.

Responsibilities

Own the platform’s measurement strategy, define metrics for learner improvement, and hold the company accountable to them.
Design and run the experimentation program, including A/B tests, holdouts, and rigorous LLM evaluation, and establish standards for other teams.
Build data infrastructure, including pipelines, a semantic layer, dashboards, and models for internal decisions and customer-facing analytics.
Partner with product, design, and engineering to turn ambiguous questions into analyses that inform product decisions.
Work directly with customers’ BI and enablement teams to help them demonstrate Yoodli’s impact within their organizations.
Build models that convert communication signals into product value, including scoring, skill progression, benchmarking, and churn or expansion prediction.
Translate analysis into clear recommendations for executives and the board, and defend those recommendations.
Set technical standards for data, review analyses, mentor engineers and product managers on experiment design, and lay the groundwork for a data team.