Raya is a technology company focused on providing utility through its apps, Raya and Places, which are tools for discovery of and access to exciting people and places globally. The company aims to provide solutions that have heretofore been impossible by marrying great software with a membership-based community built around core values of trust, curation, and authenticity. The primary data scientist role is to own how data is used to build and optimize a recommendations-first experience for the Places app, shaping the data strategy and impacting the product.
Requirements
- Strong Python and SQL knowledge; ability to write clean, reproducible code and work with large-scale datasets
- Experience with modern data tools, including dbt and Snowflake/Databricks for data modeling and transformation; Mixpanel or Segment for product analytics and event tracking; and Looker, Omni, or Tableau for visualization and dashboarding.
- Familiarity with common ML libraries (e.g. Scikit-learn, XGBoost); knowledge of deep learning frameworks like PyTorch is a bonus
- Experience applying and evaluating LLMs in practical, product-oriented settings (e.g., building or optimizing search, recommendations, or personalization tools)
- A strong analytical mindset with the ability to break down complex problems, design experiments, and generate actionable insights
- Experience with recommendation and/or search ranking systems is a big plus.
Responsibilities
- Build and maintain dashboards and metrics, helping the team self-serve and monitor key performance indicators
- Dig into user behavior, search logs, and engagement data to uncover patterns and generate new hypotheses
- Help improve data organization and infrastructure, reducing ad hoc work and improving scalability
- Design and analyze A/B tests and other experiments to guide product decisions and measure impact
- Leverage off-the-shelf models and experimentation frameworks to optimize relevance and personalization features
- Apply and evaluate large language models (LLMs) for tasks such as semantic search, personalization, and user understanding, while developing expertise in LLM evaluation methodologies and best practices
- Collaborate with ML engineers and backend/infra teams to make incremental improvements to existing recommendations systems and embedding pipelines
Other
- In this role you will be the primary data scientist on our Places app, with full ownership over how data is used to build and optimize a recommendations-first experience.
- This is a rare chance to shape our data strategy from the ground up and have a direct, visible impact across the entire product.
- You’ll work closely with product, engineering, and design to explore user behavior, run experiments, and make our product more personalized and impactful.
- This role is a great fit for someone who loves figuring things out from scratch: from diving into ambiguous questions and building dashboards, to collaborating with ML and infra teams on lightweight model improvements.
- Contribute to a data-driven culture by clearly communicating findings and empowering stakeholders with reliable, accessible insights
