Data Scientist, Sr. (Remote)

About the Company

US Foods is a foodservice company serving customers across the United States. Its data science teams use advanced analytics and machine learning to support business decisions and improve operational outcomes.

About the Role

• US Foods is seeking a Senior Data Scientist to develop, deploy, and maintain machine learning models in a production environment. This role works closely with business stakeholders, product management, and data science teams to identify business problems, evaluate potential ML solutions, and guide models from initial research through implementation.
• The Senior Data Scientist will also mentor junior team members, contribute to technical standards, and help improve data science processes and methodologies. This position is fully remote within the United States, excluding Hawaii and U.S. territories.

Key Responsibilities

• Research data sources, clean data, perform feature engineering, and develop baseline models in collaboration with Associate Data Scientists and Data Scientists.
• Independently manage multiple data science projects and model development initiatives.
• Work with cross-functional stakeholders, including product management, to align machine learning solutions with business needs.
• Own the model development lifecycle from inception through implementation, including ML pipelines, documentation, model drift monitoring, and retraining strategies.
• Mentor junior data science team members and support their technical development and stakeholder communication.
• Coordinate with the machine learning team to anticipate deployment challenges, plan resource requirements, and support successful model deployment and retraining.
• Take ownership of critical business issues and technical tickets as assigned by data science leadership.
• Navigate complex codebases to troubleshoot, debug, and improve existing code.
• Establish and promote coding standards and sound development practices across the data science team.
• Maintain documentation covering machine learning models, data sources, and methodologies.
• Contribute to model feasibility assessments and related documentation.
• Participate in research and development, recommend process improvements, and introduce new methodologies where appropriate.
• Share technical knowledge through internal presentations, workshops, and team sessions.
• Support Agile development practices, including Scrum and Kanban, by helping define features, tasks, effort estimates, and timelines.

Required Qualifications

• Master's degree in data science, mathematics, computer science, statistics, or a related field with at least 3 years of data science experience, or a bachelor's degree with at least 6 years of experience.
• Expert-level understanding of classification, regression, clustering, dimensionality reduction, association rule learning, bagging, boosting, neural networks, deep learning, model evaluation, cross-validation, hyperparameter tuning, optimization algorithms, and natural language processing.
• Working knowledge of Agile/Scrum methodologies, including epics, features, tasks, and effort estimation.
• At least 1 year of experience using a major cloud platform to develop machine learning models from data exploration through deployment.
• Experience working with large datasets in cloud environments.
• Working knowledge of APIs, continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD), DevOps, and MLOps principles.
• At least 1 year of experience writing production-grade code in Bash, Python, and SQL, including code optimization, data structure selection, and troubleshooting.
• Ability to independently navigate data lakes and create training datasets or feature stores.
• Experience creating, deploying, and troubleshooting containers for machine learning workloads.
• At least 1 year of experience with version control systems such as Git.
• Strong written, verbal, and interpersonal communication skills, with the ability to collaborate across technical and business teams.
• Ability to assess deployment limitations, data latency, algorithm suitability, and mathematical assumptions.
• Strong research and problem-solving skills related to ML frameworks, algorithms, datasets, and feature stores.
• Ability to provide technical guidance and thought leadership to junior data science team members.

Preferred Qualifications

• Intellectual curiosity about emerging data science developments, including large language models (LLMs) and generative AI.
• Ability to recommend best practices, diagnose technical issues, and guide junior team members toward effective solutions.

Salary & Benefits

• Expected Base Salary: $100,000–$155,000 per year.
• Potential Bonus: The role may be eligible for an annual incentive plan bonus.
• Benefits may include: Health insurance, pre-tax spending accounts, retirement benefits, paid time off, short-term and long-term disability, an employee stock purchase plan, and life insurance.

Compensation may vary based on relevant experience, education, skills, job responsibilities, geographic location, and other applicable factors.

Equal Opportunity

US Foods is an equal opportunity employer. Employment decisions are made without discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, genetic information, protected veteran status, or disability status.