Posted today · be early
Senior Manager, Data Science
Chess.com
WorldwideremotePosted today
Skill Required
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Key highlights
- 5+ years of data science experience
- 100% remote
- Deep familiarity with chess required
- Full-time opportunity
Role overview
Chess.com is a tech, gaming, and content company and one of the largest gaming sites in the world, serving over 250M+ chess players worldwide with a team of 600+ fully remote people. They are seeking an experienced data science leader who can act as a strategic thought partner to senior leadership and a strong individual contributor to build novel algorithms and models that shape the chess experience. The ideal candidate is a creative problem-solver comfortable building from scratch and iterating quickly. They should possess a deep understanding of applied data science and a passion for chess, specifically regarding rating systems, player development, and the challenges of cheat detection.
Responsibilities
- Own high-impact data science work across product data science and fair play.
- Create and build novel algorithms, models, and data-powered features that directly shape the chess experience for our users, from systems that protect the integrity of the game to features that make Chess.com more engaging and useful for players at every level.
- Partner across the company on product vision and execution.
- Work closely with product managers, engineers, designers, and writers to translate new stats and algorithms into decisions that power our next generation of features.
- Design and deploy creative heuristics, algorithms, and models that identify cheating at scale using the full depth of your statistical and data science toolkit.
- Raise the quality and sophistication of our approaches over time.
- Manage a lean team of data scientists.
- Turn strategy into clear team objectives and results, not just execute direction from leadership.
- Set the quality bar through your own work and give feedback that inspires teammates to do great work, not just fix the issues of the day.
- Help data scientists grow into scientists who can operate with more speed and independence over time.
- Communicate early and often, surfacing blockers before they become problems and keeping stakeholders informed without being asked.
Requirements
- 5+ years of data science experience, with a demonstrated track record of developing algorithms and models, contributing to features that shipped, and driving real value for users.
- Strong Python and SQL skills; experience building and working within data pipelines using BigQuery and GCP or similar cloud databases & storage at scale.
- Comfortable with agentic workflows and tools (Cursor, Claude Code or similar) to accelerate research ideation and execution.
- Solid machine learning fundamentals with enough depth to contribute meaningfully to models across the chess data stack, including anomaly detection for fair play and features that support learning and understanding chess at varying rating levels.
- Proven ability to communicate findings clearly to both technical peers and senior non-technical stakeholders.
- Experience managing or meaningfully mentoring other data scientists or analysts.
- Deep familiarity with chess: you like to play, have thought about rating systems and how inflation may impact ratings at scale, want to build products that you would use yourself to further your chess journey, and have done some thinking on the cheating problem and how to detect it.
Nice to have
- Experience on a consumer gaming or entertainment platform where domain-specific data science is at the core of the product.
- Comfort working in lean, high-ownership team environments where being proactive is your superpower.
Benefits
- 100% remote (work from anywhere!)
Additional details
- This is a full-time opportunity
- This role is open to candidates who can work with significant overlap with the Pacific Time Zone.
- Originally posted on Himalayas
