Senior Data Scientist, Trust

Linktree • Sydney, CA

90d • Hybrid

About The Position

As a Senior Data Scientist on Linktree’s Trust team, you will play a key role in protecting the integrity and health of our platform. You will apply your expertise in data science and statistical modeling to define how we measure harm, assess platform risk, and continuously improve our detection and mitigation systems. In this role, you will build and scale the core measurement framework that underpins Trust at Linktree, establishing clear, defensible definitions of harm prevalence, enforcement effectiveness, and user impact. You will partner closely with Engineering, Product, Policy, Legal, and Operations to identify emerging abuse patterns, size their impact, and ensure our mitigation systems are effective and aligned with our risk tolerance. You will also play a central role in evaluating and strengthening our ML and LLM-based safety systems. This includes defining high-quality ground truth datasets, establishing statistically sound evaluation benchmarks, and implementing monitoring frameworks to ensure model quality and reliability in production. In partnership with Engineering, you will identify failure modes, improve detection quality, and build monitoring frameworks that keep our systems effective as abuse patterns evolve. Your work will directly shape how Linktree understands and prioritizes platform risk and measures the effectiveness of its trust and safety investments.

Requirements

• 5+ years as a Data Scientist in a product-driven technology company
• Direct experience in Trust & Safety, Integrity, Fraud, Security, or other risk-focused domains
• Proven ability to define and operationalize metric frameworks (e.g., Prevalence, Recall, and False Positive Rates) to evaluate the effectiveness of product, policy, or ML-driven interventions
• Experience evaluating machine learning models, including offline methodology, performance tradeoffs (precision/recall, calibration), and production monitoring
• Advanced SQL proficiency and fluency in Python (or R) for advanced analytics and modeling
• Strong foundation in statistics, experimentation design, and causal inference
• Experience working within mature data platforms and analytics engineering stacks (e.g., DBT, Dagster, Airflow)
• Experience designing intuitive, decision-oriented dashboards and compelling data visualizations using tools such as Hex, Looker, Tableau, or PowerBI
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to translate complex statistical findings and risk tradeoffs into clear recommendations for cross-functional stakeholders
• Bachelor’s Degree in a quantitative field (Mathematics, Statistics, Computer Science, Physics, Economics, or related); an advanced degree (MS/PhD) is a strong plus.

Responsibilities

• Define and operationalize the core Trust metric frameworks that anchors company-wide north star goals and cross-functional team performance
• Refine and validate the scoring model used to assess Linktree quality and risk, ensuring heuristic logic is measurable, calibrated, and aligned with policy standards
• Build and maintain production-grade datasets and dashboards that provide reliable visibility into platform risk and system performance
• Identify and size emerging abuse patterns through deep-dive analysis, and translate findings into clear product, policy, operations and engineering priorities
• Partner with Engineering to define evaluation frameworks for ML detection and LLM-based safety systems, including ground truth design and performance benchmarking
• Monitor model health in production (e.g., precision, recall, calibration, drift) and proactively surface degradation, bias, or failure model
• Support Trust incident response through rapid analysis, impact sizing, and postmortem insights that drive durable improvements
• Communicate risk trends and model performance insights through clear visualizations and executive-ready narratives

Benefits

• An annual wellbeing allowance to use on things like (but not limited to) fitness memberships, development courses, childcare, travel, charitable donations, pet insurance, home office set-up - the choice is yours!
• 100% coverage (and 80% for your dependents) of your monthly premiums for medical, dental, vision, disability and life insurance for US-based employees.
• Employer contribution towards your retirement.
• Generous time off for vacation, holidays, parental leave, volunteer time, and other categories.
• Employee stock option program - we want each and every employee to share in the company’s success.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior