The posting
PURPOSE:
The Predictive Index, a leader in workplace behavioral science, is an award-winning best place to work (Inc., Glassdoor, Boston Business Journal, The Boston Globe).
Our mission is "Better work, Better world," and we take great pride in PI's power to supercharge workplace relationships and culture to achieve the unthinkable. We're our own best case study!
That includes how we work in an AI world. We're rethinking roles, teams, and careers around people and AI working together, and we're applying what we learn inside PI to the products we build for our clients. You'll be working toward a mission that inspires you, and you'll be surrounded by fun, smart, driven people day in and day out.
There's a reason more than 10,000 companies, including The LA Clippers, Hugo Boss, Nissan, Pendo, AstraZeneca, and Bosch, trust PI to help them hire top talent, design winning teams, and develop leaders at every level. Come discover how we empower our clients to solve their biggest challenges and make their business dreams come true.
The Predictive Index is a place where people with diverse backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives collaborate on amazing, important work. We celebrate our differences, knowing that they are fundamental to our success as an organization. "Better Work, Better World," starts here, in an organization where every member of the PI community is valued, respected, and welcome. We encourage people from underrepresented backgrounds to apply.
The Opportunity
Data science isn't a feature on this team. It's the foundation, and you'll be the person who builds it.
We're looking for a Staff Data Scientist to establish the data science function from the ground up in a new venture for PI. You'll be defining the discipline, setting the methods, the standards, and the infrastructure that everything downstream depends on. As the subject matter expert, you'll own the evidence behind every claim we make, every metric we ship, and every insight we surface, and you'll be accountable for making sure each one can withstand the scrutiny of the most skeptical HR buyer, product leader, or board reviewer.
Your mandate is full ownership of a scientific function inside a venture that operates with the independence of a startup and the credibility of a 70-year-old science brand. You'll make the foundational calls around what we measure and how we measure it. This opportunity is for someone who has built rigorous data science practices before, knows what excellent looks like, and wants to set the bar rather than inherit it.
What you’ll do
- Own the evidence layer of the venture, end to end. You'll be the single point of accountability for how this team turns product and customer signal into defensible knowledge about what drives client outcomes, and you'll build the function that makes that repeatable.
- Set the standard for rigor. Define the experimental methods, statistical bar, and analytical practices the team operates by, and be the final word on whether a result is real, generalizable, and safe to build on.
- Build the foundation from scratch. Stand up the instrumentation, data pipelines, dashboards, and analytics infrastructure the team runs on, making the architectural decisions that future data science decisions are built upon.
- Identify what actually drives outcomes. Correlate the product signals that move client results, separating what genuinely moves the needle from what merely looks good in a demo, and turn those findings into durable, differentiated product value.
- Run the experiments that decide direction. Design and run cohort and funnel experiments to validate or kill hypotheses fast, and build the feedback loops that compound the venture's advantage over time.
- Shape strategy, not just inform it. Partner with Product, GTM, and Behavioral Science as a peer decision-maker, bringing evidence to the table early enough to shape the roadmap, the market thesis, and the bets the team makes.
- Extend the function over time. Establish the practices, documentation, and standards that let data science scale as the venture grows.
What you bring
If you've built a data science function before and want to do it again with more autonomy, this is your role. If you've got most of what's below, we still want to hear from you.
- 7+ years of substantial, staff-level experience as a data scientist in product environments, enough to have developed strong, defensible opinions about how the work should be done and the judgment to know when to break your own rules.
- A track record of building product analytics from scratch and owning them end to end. You're comfortable in the code, and you've personally stood up instrumentation, pipelines, and dashboards in live product environments.
- Deep expertise running product experiments with the statistical rigor to know when a result is real, when it's noise, and when the design itself can't answer the question. You can defend your methodology and teach it to a room that isn't quantitative.
- The ability to operate as the sole subject matter expert, setting direction without a senior peer to check your work, and being the person others trust to get the science right.
- Fluency translating ambiguous business questions into tractable data problems, and translating the answers back into decisions Product, GTM, and leadership can act on immediately.
- Comfort working at the frontier, where the research agenda, the product roadmap, and the go-to-market strategy are all still being written, with the maturity to bring order to that ambiguity.
- A graduate degree (or equivalent applied experience) in Statistics, Data Science, Computer Science, Econometrics, Quantitative Psychology, or a closely related quantitative field.
- Passion for using AI in every aspect of your work. We're an AI-forward team that expects every member to take full advantage of modern tools to sharpen thinking, move faster, and extend the team's capacity.
- A builder's mindset and the seniority to match. This team moves fast, operates lean, and expects every person to cover surface area well beyond their title. You own outcomes, not tasks.
What it’s like here
You’ll be one of twelve people on a team operating like a venture-backed startup — with its own stack, its own cadence, and its own mandate to find and validate a new market. You’ll report directly to the venture lead and work alongside product, engineering, and go-to-market functions all operating at the same pace.
PI is headquartered in Westwood, MA, and is geo-flexible for candidates with the right fit. This is an exempt, salaried position ($170,000 - $220,000) with full access to PI’s benefits package, including unlimited PTO and 401(k).
At The Predictive Index, we value flexibility. All PI employees have the choice to work either at our Westwood, MA headquarters, Remote, or a mix of both! Every PI employee gets access to AI tools and ongoing training to use them well.
Just as our employees are threads in the cultural fabric of PI, THREADS is our framework for understanding our core values.
Teamwork: Focus on the “we,” not the “me.”
Honesty: Follow your moral compass.
Reliability: Be someone others can count on.
Energy: Be balanced, be energized.
Action: Errors of action are better than errors of inaction. Be brave.
Drive: Own it.
Scope: Don't try to boil the ocean.
The Predictive Index participates in E-Verify. E-Verify is an Internet-based system that compares information from an employee's Form I-9, Employment Eligibility Verification, to data from U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Social Security Administration records to confirm employment eligibility.
The Predictive Index is an Equal Opportunity Employer.
This position may be performed in our Massachusetts headquarters or remotely within the United States.
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