The posting
Job Description
About the Role
The Rider team is the centerpiece of the Uber consumer experience, owning the flagship app used by over 100M monthly active users. The Personalization team builds the ranking, recommendation and agentic systems that shape what millions of riders see and do in the app. We are looking for a Senior Scientist to bring scientific rigor to this work and to help set its direction. You will be an experimentation and causal inference expert with strong ML fluency who will own how we measure whether our AI/ML systems are working, and you will use deep-dive analysis to show the team where the biggest opportunities are. You will partner closely with applied scientists and ML engineers to ensure we can trust our results, understand why a model wins or loses, and focus the roadmap on what moves rider outcomes.
What You'll Do
- Own experimentation for personalization. Design, run and analyze experiments for ranking, recommendation and agentic features. This includes interleaving, holdouts, switchbacks, and variance reduction (e.g., CUPED/regression adjustment). Use difference-in-differences, synthetic control, instrumental variables, regression discontinuity, or propensity methods, and be clear about the identifying assumptions.
- Close the gap between offline and online evaluation. Build offline evaluation and simulation frameworks (e.g., NDCG/MRR, counterfactual and off-policy evaluation). Diagnose why offline gains don't show up online, including novelty effects, distribution shift and training-serving skew.
- Go deep on the data. Run deep-dive analyses of rider behavior, funnels, and ranking and recommendation outcomes. Include heterogeneous treatment effects and long-term versus short-term tradeoffs. Surface proactive insights that change what the team builds next.
- Define success, guardrail and long-term metrics for personalization surfaces. Make results easy to find and use through dashboards, query templates and debugging tools.
- Shape the roadmap. Turn analysis into clear recommendations for PMs, engineers and applied scientists, and help the team decide which bets to prioritize and which to stop.
- Raise the scientific bar. Review experiment designs and model evaluations, mentor junior scientists, and share best practices across the team. Partner with applied scientists on experiment design for new ML approaches (e.g., listwise ranking, reinforcement learning, evidential deep learning, LLM-based/agentic applications).
- Stay current on advances in causal inference, experimentation and personalization AI/ML.
Basic Qualifications
- M.S. or Bachelor's degree in Statistics, Economics, Computer Science, Mathematics, Operations Research, or another quantitative field.
- 5+ years of industry experience as a Data Scientist, Applied Scientist, Research Scientist, or equivalent, with a track record of owning experimentation and/or causal inference end to end.
- Deep expertise in experiment design and analysis (power, variance reduction, multiple testing, interference/network effects) and in observational causal inference methods.
- Working knowledge of machine learning. You can critique and debug models, understand ranking/recommender approaches and common failure modes, and use ML as an analytical tool.
- Proficiency in Python and SQL, plus PySpark or similar big-data tools. You can build production-quality analysis pipelines.
- Strong business and product sense. You can frame ambiguous problems, take them end to end, and communicate recommendations clearly to technical and non-technical partners
Preferred Qualifications
- Ph.D. or M.S. in Statistics, Economics, or a related field with a causal inference or econometrics focus.
- Experience evaluating ranking, recommender, search or feed systems (offline vs. online evaluation, interleaving, counterfactual evaluation).
- Experience with heterogeneous treatment effects, uplift modeling, or long-term effect estimation/surrogate metrics.
- Experience measuring or evaluating LLM-based or agentic applications.
- Hands-on experience with ML frameworks (scikit-learn, PyTorch or TensorFlow), and with good practices such as design documentation, testing and Git.
- History of mentoring and raising the technical bar for a team.
Responsibilities
For New York City, NY-based roles: The base salary range for this role is USD $190,000 per year - USD $211,000 per year.
You will be eligible to participate in Uber's bonus program, and may be offered an equity award & other types of comp. All full-time employees are eligible to participate in a 401(k) plan. You will also be eligible for various benefits.
About Us
Ready to Ride?
This isn't the kind of place where you follow a playbook — it's where you help write one. If you're driven by impact, energized by challenge, and ready to shape how the world moves — we'd love to hear from you.
You may be eligible for bonuses, equity, and other compensation, as well as a range of benefits. Explore our benefits.
Offices remain key to collaboration and Uber's culture. Unless approved for full remote work, employees must spend at least 50% of their time in-office. Some roles, like those at greenlight hubs, require full-time in-office presence. Ask your Recruiter for details about this role's requirements.
Uber is proud to be an Equal Opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, color, religion, national origin, disability, protected Veteran status, age, or any other characteristic protected by law. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know by completing this form.
