Senior Data Scientist

Role Overview

The Advanced Analytics & AI (AAA) team is accountable for both pioneering new classes of data that power our business, and ensuring that data is powerful, clear, correct and easy to use throughout the company. The team collaborates closely with the engineering, product development, commercial, and clinical teams to transform data into actionable insights that propel Virta’s mission forward.

As a Senior Data Scientist on the AAA team, you will play a crucial role in shaping our data-driven decision making processes and in driving impactful insights that advance our mission. This role offers a unique blend of hands-on coding and strategic leadership, working closely in partnership with the Product Development group that supports adoption of our member-facing products. You will get a chance to work closely with stakeholders to create impactful data-driven reports and analyses that strengthen Virta’s value proposition.

Responsibilities

• Serve as data lead for the Retention Squad: Understand the product – strategy, goals, roadmap, users – deeply enough to identify high-impact, strategic opportunities and risks. Use data to steer conversations: bring data-driven hypotheses, challenge assumptions, frame trade-offs, prioritize strategically. Translate vague product hunches into sharp analytical questions, and design the right approach to answer them. Be the source of truth for KPIs and product metrics: help define and monitor them, and identify trends and drivers.
• Drive decision making with data: Prioritize analyses that meaningfully inform product decisions and change outcomes, reframe analysis requests that won’t do that into ones that will, and design and deliver the resulting analyses properly and rapidly.
• Lead experimentation thoughtfully: guide the team on when and when not to experiment, help enable self-serve experimentation, and focus on frequent, small experiments to speed learning.
• Identify where product strategy and ideas could be better, more easily, or more quickly implemented with the help of AI (ML or GenAI), and help enable this integration.
• Show up as a collaborative leader, not simply a service provider, and help focus work on what matters most.
• Work end-to-end to translate clinical, member, and claims data from our data warehouse into actionable recommendations: work with stakeholders to design reports and dashboards that answer real business questions, design the data flows to support these, and build the required data transformation pipelines.

Must-Haves

• Experience working at a digital health or similar startup, preferably during the growth phase, in order to function effectively in a fast-paced, rapidly changing environment.
• 7+ years of experience in a Healthcare Analytics or Data Science role, working with large datasets and conducting statistical and quantitative modeling, melding analytics with strong programming, data mining, clustering and segmentation.
• 5+ years of work experience working data science and visualization tools (SQL, R, and/or Python)
• Advanced understanding of data storage, ETL frameworks, data transformation, and validation
• Experience in building BI dashboards using tools such as Looker or Tableau
• Ability to explain technology, techniques and approaches to others

Nice-to-Haves

• Experience leading cross-functional efforts to build scalable systems and data pipelines, working with complex data structures
• Understanding of Generative AI concepts and basic usage of GenAI tools (ChatGPT, Claude, etc.)
• Experience building pipelines using dbt
• Demonstrated project management experience