Senior Manager, Data Science

Senior Manager, Data Science

What you'll do

• 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. In a fully remote culture, proactive communication is how work actually gets done. Surface blockers before they become problems, keep stakeholders informed without being asked, and make sure your team is never left wondering where things stand.

Required Skills

• 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.

Preferred Skills

• 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.

About the Opportunity

• This is a full-time opportunity
• We are 100% remote (work from anywhere!)
• This role is open to candidates who can work with good overlap between Eastern time through Pacific Time zones