Lead Data Scientist

About Marley Spoon

Were Marley Spoon a food-tech company on a mission to help people cook better eat smarter and waste less. Our meal kits are powered by data across menu planning marketing operations and logistics. Now were looking for a Lead Data Scientist Growth & Personalization based in Portugal working remote-first with the option to join colleagues in our Lisbon office for collaboration days.

About the Role

Youll report to our VP Data & AI and lead a small but high-impact group of Data Scientists and ML-focused analysts partnering closely with our Digital (Product Design Engineering) and Marketing teams.

In your first 1218 months you will:

1. Own personalization & recommendations (your core mandate)

• Design build and iterate recommender systems that personalise menus content and customer journeys across our brands.

• Use ranking uplift modelling and experimentation to help customers quickly find meals theyll actually love increasing first-box and repeat conversion.

• Work with Product and Design to translate model outputs into simple intuitive experiences.

2. Drive growth analytics & marketing effectiveness

• Develop models and analytical frameworks for LTV CAC payback attribution and audience targeting across paid and lifecycle channels.

• Partner with Growth and CRM teams to set up and evaluate experiments (e.g. new offers onboarding flows lifecycle journeys) and turn insights into action.

• Help shape how we allocate marketing budget by bringing data-driven scenarios and trade-offs to the table.

3. Reduce churn & improve retention

• Build and refine churn and reactivation models to identify at-risk customers and the levers most likely to retain them.

• Collaborate with Product CRM and Customer Care to design targeted interventions and measure their impact through controlled experiments.

4. Raise the bar on ML in production

• Oversee the end-to-end lifecycle of key modelsfrom problem framing and data selection to deployment monitoring and retraining.

• Work with our data and platform teams to ensure robust observable ML services (versioning alerting performance tracking) that teams can trust and use.

5. Lead and grow a small DS/ML team

• Coach and mentor 23 Data Scientists / ML-focused analysts helping them sharpen their craft and own meaningful parts of the roadmap.

• Provide clear direction regular feedback and a psychologically safe environment where experimentation and learning are part of everyday work.

6. Champion an experimentation & data-first culture

• Partner with Product Engineering Digital and Marketing to design A/B tests interpret results and make balanced decisions (speed vs. rigour).

• Help non-technical stakeholders understand what the models say what they dont say and where uncertainty sits so they can make better calls

Youll occasionally collaborate with Analytics and Operations on forecasting and supply/demand topics but your core ownership is growth & personalization not all things data..

About You

Youre a technically strong Data Scientist whos already stepped into leadership and now wants a role where you can both build and shape a function.

Youll likely bring:

• 6 years of experience in Data Science / ML with 3 years in a lead role guiding teams and shipping production ML systems.

• Deep experience with machine learning & statistical modelling in at least one of: recommender systems experimentation platforms growth analytics or retention / churn modelling.

• Strong skills in Python SQL and common ML libraries (e.g. scikit-learn XGBoost PyTorch or similar).

• A track record of connecting models to real business outcomesfor example improved retention uplift in conversion better ROI on marketing spend or more efficient operations.

• Experience with modern data stacks (e.g. a cloud data warehouse such as Snowflake or similar BI tools like Looker and orchestration / deployment tools for ML).

• Clear confident communication with both technical and non-technical stakeholders especially when explaining trade-offs uncertainty and experiment results.

• A collaborative pragmatic mindset: you care less about the fanciest model and more about what works scales and gets adopted.

How We Work

• This role is remote within Portugal. We occasionally bring people together in person (e.g. for workshops planning or team days) and youll have the option to join meet-ups in Lisbon or other hubs but theres no weekly office requirement.

• Youll join a Data Tribe that brings together Data Analytics and ML across brands and markets with peers who care about craft impact and knowledge-sharing.

• Day-to-day youll work most closely with our Digital (Product Design Engineering) and Marketing teams turning ideas into experiments and models into shipped features.

Please note: were currently only able to consider candidates who already have the right to work in Portugal. Were not able to sponsor visas for this role.

Benefits:

• Hybrid work policy (remote office).

• 22 annual leave days 2 days extra days for every year of tenure (up to 6).

• 5 training days per year.

• Private health insurance provided by Tranquilidade.

• Food allowance of 7.62/worked day under by Coverflex.

• 24/7 confidential employee assistance program.