Senior Data Scientist III

A top AAA Gaming Studio is Seeking a Senior Data Scientist to join their Los Angeles, CA team!

Title: Data Scientist III

Industry: Gaming/Entertainment

Location: Los Angeles, CA

Duration: 12 months

Rate: $106 - $132/HR (***W2 ONLY***)

Job Description:

Data Scientist III - WOARior

As a Data Scientist III on the Central Product Insights Team, you ll be responsible for helping our client deepen their understanding of their players, our live games performance, and their R&D games performance. You ll conduct advanced statistical analyses and build predictive data models that leverage survey data combined with game telemetry - in partnership with game analysts and researchers - to inform our understanding of the relationship between sentiment, subjective player experience, and player engagement or monetization. This position is for a 12-month contract, during which time you ll conduct exploratory data analysis and apply modeling techniques to centralized survey datasets, testing various hypotheses regarding how sentiment is related to engagement and monetization.

Responsibilities:

• Work as part of a central team to build insights and frameworks that improve foundational understanding of our players and games
• Create and test hypotheses about the ways sentiment and engagement / monetization interrelate, including exploration of both leading and lagging relationships
• Conduct exploratory data analysis and build models that connect complex sentiment with player telemetry data, for the same subjects
• Transform and prepare datasets, including longitudinal survey and other complex datasets, to be amenable to the above analyses
• Consult on survey design and methodology, to improve the chance of success with the above analyses
• Partner with analysts and researchers to generate documentation of your findings
• Improve the state of various data science products within the remit of Central Product Insights, including feature additions, product maintenance, and automation
• Train analysts and data scientists to re-run your analyses and work with any models or other data science products that you build / improve

Required Qualifications

• Ph.D. in Machine Learning, AI, Statistics, Math, or related Computer Science/Quantitative field with 3+ years of industry experience (including Postdoc), or equivalent experience (i.e., M.S. with 4-6+ years of relevant experience, or B.S. with 6-8+ years of relevant experience)
• Proficiency using Python and SQL for large-scale data analysis in distributed computing environments (e.g., Spark or cloud-based platforms like Databricks)
• Experience conducting exploratory data analysis on ordinal and continuous data, with a focus on extracting meaningful insights to inform hypotheses, models, or product decisions.
• Proficiency applying causal inference methods to observational panel data (e.g., fixed effects, inverse probability weighting).
• Experience modeling longitudinal sentiment data, especially multi-item constructs (e.g., using latent growth models or hierarchical models).
• Skilled in preparing complex survey datasets, including handling multicollinearity, missing data, irregular time spacing, weighting, and reshaping wide/long data.
• Familiarity with survey methodology and longitudinal study design, including:
• Wave cadence and timing
• Panel attrition and bias mitigation strategies
• Question construction and psychometric consistency

Desired Qualifications

• Prior experience working with player-facing survey programs.
• Prior experience working with researcher tools for survey analysis (e.g., R, Q, SPSS).
• Strong communication and documentation skills for sharing insights with cross-functional partners.