Principal Data Scientist
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Job Location:
Monthly Salary:
Posted on:
27-10-2025
Vacancies:
1 Vacancy
Job Summary
About the Company
Playvalve is a vibrant fast-growing gaming studio with an eye on the future. Our mission is to build fun and relaxing games meant to last and we do that by bringing together a team of experts who love what they do. Our talented designers artists engineers marketeers and analysts have created several games delivering joy and entertainment to over 20M users across more than 12 languages and 90 countries.
About the Role
As a Principal Data Scientist youll drive the data science strategy and ship the systems that make it real. Youll partner with marketing product and ad monetization to turn rigorous science into production services. You own the journey end-to-end (problem framing modeling offline/online evaluation serving and monitoring) establish engineering and scientific standards and prioritize autonomously by impact vs. effort. Youll iterate on the companys data strategy while mentoring the junior team members and scaling the team capabilities.
Key Responsibilities
- Own real-time decisioning systems end-to-end. Alongside with Engineering build and run robust services that pick game and ad configs; ship models as stable APIs/pipelines handle retries and late data keep clear targets with simple fallbacks and roll out safely with quick rollback.
- Keep modeling practical. Start with strong baselines pick the right approach test offline then prove impact with controlled experiments.
- Drive experimentation at scale. Define hypotheses and success metrics run online experiments and translate results into business decisions with quantified impact.
- Partner across the org. Work closely with Product Ads Monetization and UA to prioritize by impact vs. effort align on objectives and land outcomes.
- Mentor & lead. Coach DS/DA teammates review code/models/experiments and raise the bar on scientific rigor and production quality.
- Communicate clearly. Explain trade-offs and uncertainty to technical and non-technical stakeholders; turn findings into decisive actions.
Requirements
- 7 years in data science including 2 years owning production ML systems at scale.
- Strong scientific foundation: MSc/PhD in CS Statistics Applied Math Physics or equivalent backgrounds.
- Demonstrated experience with machine learning techniques with solid experience in either supervised and unsupervised learning and/or deep learning frameworks ( PyTorch etc.).
- Proficiency in Python and SQL; solid software engineering (testing code review profiling).
- Familiarity with cloud-based data storage and processing platforms (e.g. AWS Google Cloud Platform or Azure).
- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with a proven track record of translating complex data into actionable insights.
- Ability to understand business needs across multiple teams and execute to achieve their targets.
- Excellent communication and presentation skills with the ability to convey complex information to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Professional-level English.
Nice to have
- Solid understanding of mathematical and algorithmic optimization approaches and/or practical expertise applying those to real-world problems.
- Production/MLOps experience: Docker CI/CD model serving feature stores monitoring & drift detection.
- Streaming & services: GCP (BigQuery Pub/Sub Dataflow/Beam Vertex AI Cloud Run/GKE) or similar stacks.
- Experience in data science in mobile gaming is a plus.
What we offer
- The Role: Own data science solutions from scratch with full autonomy. Join a meetingless company no status updates no sync calls just deep work and results.
- Location & Flexibility: Based in Barcelona (office with terrace BBQ beer tap). Flexibility policy: the data team comes in regularly because they want to not because they have to.
- Compensation & Perks: Competitive compensation based on experience relocation package health insurance ticket restaurant unlimited vacations regular company off-sites.
- The Challenge: 15 games in market ambitious pipeline. Industry inflection point with AI and automation. Profit-backed studio with no VC pressure and resources to do it right.
Questions Were happy to discuss the challenge the opportunity or why Barcelona is the perfect place to build this.
Required Experience:
Staff IC
Key Skills
- Machine Learning
- Python
- Data Science
- AI
- R
- Research Experience
- Sensors
- Drug Discovery
- Research & Development
- Natural Language Processing
- Data Analysis Skills
- Toxicology Experience
About Company
About the CompanyPlayvalve is a vibrant fast-growing gaming studio with an eye on the future. Our mission is to build fun and relaxing games meant to last, and we do that by bringing together a team of experts who love what they do. Our talented designers, artists, engineers, marketee ... View more
