Senior Data Scientist, Feed Relevance

Patreon is a media and community platform where over 300,000 creators give their biggest fans access to exclusive work and experiences. We offer creators a variety of ways to engage with their communities and build a lasting business including: paid memberships, free memberships, community chats, live experiences, and selling to fans directly with one-time purchases.

Ultimately our goal is simple: fund the creative class. And we're leaders in that space, with:

• $8 billion+ in revenue generated since Patreon's inception

• 60 million+ free new memberships for fans who may not be ready to pay just yet, and

• 10 million+ fans paying each month for exclusive access to creators' work and community.

We're continuing to invest heavily in building the best creator platform with the best team in the creator economy and are looking for a Data Scientist to support our mission.

This role is based in New York or San Francisco and open to those who are able to be in-office 2 days per week on a hybrid work model.

About the Team

The Relevance team owns feed ranking and recommendations across Patreon's core surfaces — Home Feed, Membership Feed, Post Page Recommendations, and Niches. We're building the systems that decide what content fans see and in what order, with the goal of making every fan's experience on Patreon feel personally relevant. Our cross-functional pod includes ML Engineers, Product Managers, Backend Engineers, Client Engineers, and Data Scientists working together to improve content discovery, deepen fan engagement, and drive creator monetization. We're at an exciting inflection point: our ranking and recommendation systems are being built largely from scratch, which means you'll have outsized influence on the technical direction and measurement frameworks that shape how millions of fans discover creators.

About the Role

• You'll own the analytics foundation for Patreon's feed — building and maintaining the trustworthy metrics infrastructure that powers dashboards, experiment analysis, ML training data, and leadership reporting.

• You'll design and analyze ranking experiments across Home Feed, Membership Feed, Post Page Recs, and Niches, working closely with ML Engineers to evaluate relevance changes and new ranking signals.

• You'll conduct exploratory analyses to surface data-backed hypotheses about feed health, content mix, engagement patterns, and discovery conversion — and translate those into actionable ranking improvements.

• You'll develop feed health and engagement dashboards with drill-downs by surface, user segment, platform (iOS vs. Android), and feed version.

• You'll be a thought partner to Product and ML Engineering, helping the team prioritize ranking experiments and measure what matters — from scroll depth and CTR to Discovery Attributed TPV.

• You'll be a cultural and technical leader on the data science team.

About You

• Bachelor's degree in Statistics, Economics, Engineering, Mathematics, a related quantitative field, or equivalent practical experience.

• You have experience working on a content feed, ranking system, or recommendation platform — you understand retrieval, scoring, and the tradeoffs involved in optimizing for multiple objectives.

• You are an experimentation expert, especially with A/B testing on ranking or recommendation changes, and possess a very strong statistical inference skillset.

• You have experience building metrics and reporting infrastructure that teams rely on as a source of truth (dashboards, data quality pipelines, alerting).

• You have solid analytical thinking — you dig into cross-platform inconsistencies, engagement anomalies, and data quality issues until you find the root cause.

• You have experience making tradeoffs between speed and accuracy in fast-moving, ambiguous environments.

• You are a SQL expert and have experience in Python or R to perform statistical analyses.

• You have a track record of building strong relationships with product, ML engineering, and data engineering teammates.

• You have a growth mindset and aspire to continuously improve your soft and technical skills.

• You are an expert communicator with a love for clarity and simplicity.

About Patreon

Patreon powers creators to do what they love and get paid by the people who love what they do. Our team is passionate about making this mission and our core values come to life every day in our work. Through this work, our Patronauts:

• Put Creators First | They’re the reason we’re here. When creators win, we win.

• Build with Craft | We sign our name to every deliverable, just like the creators we serve.

• Make it Happen | We don’t quit. We learn and deliver.

• Win Together | We grow as individuals. We win as a team.

We hire talented and passionate people from different backgrounds because workplace diversity and inclusion is critical to our ability to serve creators worldwide. If you’re excited about a role but your past experience doesn’t match with every bullet point outlined above, we strongly encourage you to apply anyway. If you’re a creator at heart, are energized by our mission, and share our company values, we’d love to hear from you.

Patreon is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We provide employment opportunities without regard to age, race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion, disability, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, veteran status, or any other protected class. If you need a reasonable accommodation during the interview process, please let us know via email at accomodations@patreon.

[US] Patreon offers a competitive benefits package including and not limited to salary, equity plans, healthcare, flexible time off, company holidays and recharge days, commuter benefits, lifestyle stipends, learning and development stipends, patronage, parental leave, and 401k plan with matching.

Patreon operates under a hybrid work model, where employees based in office locations are expected to come into the office two days per week, excluding sick time and paid leave. The goal of this policy is to be intentional about the in-person time we spend together to strengthen the feeling of community at Patreon. Candidates hired into remote-eligible roles are not expected to meet the same requirements.

At Patreon, we believe in fair and transparent pay. In compliance with New York and California pay transparency laws, we are sharing the expected salary range for this role.

The posted salary range is dependent on the location and the level. This range may encompass multiple levels within the role’s job family. The final offer will be based on candidate’s experience, skills, competencies, and geographic location, aligning with the appropriate job level within Patreon’s leveling framework. For remote employees located outside CA and NY, salary may vary based on location and local market conditions.

Patreon reserves the right to modify or update compensation and benefits at any time.