Data Scientist: Panel Growth & Insights

We are seeking a skilled Data Scientist to join our marketing team with a focus on expanding and optimizing our respondent panel. This role involves recruiting new members through targeted channels, analyzing the current panel composition to identify gaps, and maintaining engagement with existing members. You will also be responsible for managing the reporting framework that tracks panel performance, including dashboards and executive summaries. The position balances growth marketing and data science tasks equally, making a background in marketing or growth analytics essential. Experience working with panels, membership bases, or communities is highly advantageous.

Key Responsibilities

- Plan and execute panel recruitment strategies across paid social, search, referral, affiliate, and partnership channels.
- Evaluate channel performance based on cost per active and profiled member rather than cost per signup, adjusting budgets accordingly.
- Analyze panel composition relative to client needs, identify underrepresented profiles, and steer recruitment efforts to address these gaps.
- Develop segmentation models for member profiling to determine study eligibility and categorize members by engagement for targeted communications.
- Create churn and response propensity models, validating them against actual member behavior and intervention outcomes.
- Minimize member drop-off caused by repeated screen-outs and survey fatigue by improving targeting to reach members more likely to qualify.
- Monitor sample quality by detecting fraudulent or duplicate accounts, speeding, straight-lining, and professional respondents, and trace these issues back to recruitment sources.
- Design and test incentive structures that balance response rates with data quality.
- Conduct A/B and holdout tests on signup flows, invitation strategies, and lifecycle campaigns, ensuring proper sample sizing and guardrail metrics.
- Own end-to-end panel reporting, including operational dashboards for marketing and panel teams, and executive-level views covering growth, acquisition costs, panel health, and quota feasibility.
- Present insights and recommendations clearly to senior stakeholders, including C-level executives, focusing on actionable narratives rather than raw data.
- Automate recurring reports to reduce manual effort and establish consistent KPIs and metric definitions across the business.
- Ensure compliance with data protection regulations and industry standards related to member consent, personal data handling, and incentive processes.

Required Qualifications

- 4–5 years of experience in growth marketing analytics, data science, or a data-intensive marketing role, with a portfolio of projects you have directly owned.
- Strong marketing or growth background, comfortable with acquisition cost metrics, payback periods, channel mix, and funnel analysis, and an understanding of blended CAC limitations.
- Proven experience building customer or member segmentation models that have been operationalized and used by teams.
- Demonstrable skills in creating dashboards and reports for senior stakeholders, with the ability to discern what information is appropriate for executive-level presentations.
- Proficiency in Python, NoSQL, and SQL, including the ability to develop scheduled data pipelines beyond notebook environments.
- Expertise in machine learning, predictive modeling, applied statistics, A/B test design, sample sizing, and incrementality measurement.
- Strong skills in Power BI or Tableau, advanced Excel capabilities, and familiarity with CRM, email, and marketing platform data.
- Ability to collaborate effectively with marketing and panel operations teams, communicate findings clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences, and recommend actionable steps.

Preferred Qualifications and Benefits

- Experience working with research panels, survey samples, membership bases, or loyalty programs.
- Knowledge of respondent quality and fraud detection techniques such as device fingerprinting, duplicate detection, and attention checks.
- Familiarity with quota management, feasibility logic, weighting, and ensuring representativeness against census or target population data.
- Experience with lifecycle and CRM automation tools, marketing attribution, and incrementality testing.
- Exposure to cloud platforms such as AWS or Azure.
- Experience defining company-wide metric standards or developing a single source of truth for reporting.

This role offers a unique blend of hands-on data analysis and strategic ownership of reporting that informs leadership decisions. You will be expected not only to generate insights but also to interpret them and recommend clear, data-driven actions to drive panel growth and quality.