Senior Data Scientist-Intelligent Assignment Engine (Hybrid)

Rewards Network • Chicago, IL

18h • Hybrid

About The Position

Rewards Network is seeking a Senior Data Scientist with strong technical depth across data science, large-scale data pipelines, and production ML/data systems. This role involves leading the execution of complex data engineering and data science workstreams, including batch pipelines processing hundreds of millions to billions of records, orchestration, customer segmentation, feature generation and management, and real-time or near-real-time assignment systems. The ideal candidate will be comfortable driving technical architecture decisions, defining and evolving data attributes and metrics, and bridging the gap between business stakeholders and engineering/data teams. This position will operate as a technical lead, guiding a team without formal management responsibility. This is a hybrid position requiring in-office presence three days a week (Tuesday-Thursday) in Chicago.

Requirements

• Master’s degree in data science or related field
• 5+ years of experience in a data science role
• Proven ability to define and operate pipeline SLAs and data freshness guarantees, including monitoring, alerting, and incident response for batch and near-real-time data workflows.
• Demonstrated track record designing activity-based segmentation and tiering frameworks (e.g., RFM-style models, engagement tiers, merchant activity classifications), including threshold definition, refresh cadence design, and validation against business outcomes.
• Hands-on background designing and implementing scoring, ranking, or recommendation frameworks, including feature selection, weighting strategies (rule-based, heuristic, and/or ML-driven), and evaluation against business objectives; familiarity with evolving such systems from deterministic scoring toward ML-based personalization.
• Strong technical foundation across data science and data engineering; comfortable owning and directing production pipeline work.
• Proven experience designing and managing customer segmentation pipelines and feature generation at scale, including the construction and lifecycle management of member groups, derived attributes, and reusable feature sets.
• Experience designing and leading large-scale data processing systems (hundreds of millions to billions of records), including batch pipeline architecture, partitioning, staging, and performance optimization.
• Experience with workflow orchestration (Airflow/MWAA or equivalent) and AWS data services (S3, Glue, Aurora/PostgreSQL).
• Strong SQL and Python skills; ability to review, guide, and produce production-quality data pipeline code.
• Understanding of event-driven architectures and Kafka-based data replication patterns.
• Experience with or strong understanding of real-time or near-real-time data systems and ability to provide architectural guidance even if not the primary builder.
• Ability to design, define, and document data attributes, metrics, and eligibility logic from business requirements.
• Experience working with large-scale member or customer data in a personalization, targeting, loyalty, or recommendation context.
• Demonstrated ability to work cross-functionally and influence without authority; comfortable in stakeholder-facing conversations and capable of holding a business conversation and a technical one in the same meeting.
• Self-directed and autonomous; able to own a workstream end-to-end and provide leadership direction to others with minimal oversight.
• Strong written and verbal communication; able to produce clear documentation and present findings to non-technical audiences.

Nice To Haves

• Experience with offer, loyalty, dining, or hospitality platforms
• Familiarity with Scala or JVM-based systems, particularly in the context of real-time API or microservice architectures that the data pipeline integrates.
• Experience with analytics engineering (dbt or similar) or oversight of BI data model layers.
• Familiarity with CDC-based replication patterns and data synchronization between systems.
• Familiarity with ML model deployment and serving (AWS SageMaker, Bedrock, or equivalent), A/B testing frameworks, and an understanding of how foundation models and RAG-based architectures can be applied to personalization and recommendation use cases at scale.

Responsibilities

• Oversee SLAs across the Intelligent Assignment Engine (IAE) pipeline (batch completion, feed delivery, attribute freshness, assignment turnaround) and drive activity-based classification and tiering of members and merchants, ensuring definitions, thresholds, and refresh cadences are aligned with business and downstream consumption needs.
• Design and build the offer priority scoring framework used to rank eligible offers per member, including score definition, input features (member attributes, merchant attributes, behavioral signals, business priorities), weighting logic, and validation against business objectives, and evolve the scoring model as personalization and ML capabilities mature.
• Provide technical leadership and execution guidance across the IAE pipeline, including nightly batch assignment processing, member and merchant attribute management, eligibility evaluation logic, and S3-based data feed production.
• Lead the design, generation, and ongoing management of customer segmentation and feature pipelines, including member group construction, attribute bucketing strategy, and the production of feature sets used for offer eligibility evaluation and targeting.
• Lead the design and optimization of large-scale data processing workflows handling hundreds of millions to billions of records, including partitioning strategy, bulk ingestion, and performance tuning.
• Own the evolution of the IAE attribute pipeline including member and merchant attribute design, metric definition, bucketing strategy, and ongoing quality validation, and drive alignment with business stakeholders on open decisions (tier boundaries, bucket values, time windows, metric design).
• Provide architectural guidance on the development of a real-time synchronous API layer for offer assignment, including near-real-time member enrollment and user-triggered assignment events, and ensure sound integration with the broader batch pipeline.
• Oversee the analytics mart maintenance and incremental build-out post-MVP, ensuring data models remain accurate, performant, and aligned with evolving reporting needs.
• Act as the primary technical bridge between business stakeholders (product, marketing, finance) and the IAE/data engineering team, translating business requirements into data pipeline and attribute requirements and translating data constraints back into business-legible terms.
• Guide and review the work of junior data scientists and data engineers on the IAE team, providing technical direction and prioritization support without formal people management responsibility.
• Collaborate with the Nova platform team and engineering to ensure IAE outputs meet downstream data contracts, S3 feed schemas, and serve the offer assignment pipeline reliably.
• Define and maintain data contracts between IAE and downstream consumers (Nova, analytics marts, dashboards).
• Identify and surface data quality risks, pipeline gaps, and go-live readiness issues across IAE's attribute and assignment outputs.
• Build and maintain documentation of IAE architecture, data models, pipeline logic, attribute definitions, and feature generation processes to reduce key-person dependency and support team continuity.
• Contribute to the future development of offer personalization and recommendation capabilities, including A/B testing frameworks, behavioral modeling from member dining habits, and an informed point of view on how ML and generative AI approaches can evolve the assignment and eligibility engine over time.

Benefits

• Competitive Time Off Benefits: including flexible PTO, 11 company holidays, and parental leave.
• Generous dining reimbursement when you dine with our restaurant clients
• 401(k) plan with a company match
• Two medical plan options- Standard PPO or High Deductible Health Plan (HSA with company match for HDHP participants)
• Partnership with Rx n Go, offering certain prescriptions for free
• Two dental plan options and a vision plan
• Flexible Spending Accounts and a pre-tax commuter benefit program
• Accident, Critical Illness, and Hospital Indemnity Insurance Plans
• Short Term and Long Term disability
• Company-paid life insurance and AD&D insurance, supplemental employee, spouse, and child life insurance
• Employee Life Assistance Program

What This Job Offers

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