Senior Manager, Data Science
About Us
Chess.com is one of the largest gaming sites in the world and the #1 platform for playing, learning, and enjoying chess.
We are a team of 600+ fully remote people in 60+ countries working hard to serve the global chess community. We are here to support 250M+ chess players worldwide with the best possible product, content, and tools to serve the community!
We are a tech company. A gaming company. A content company. And we do it all with passion and commitment to the game. Above all we prize our mission-driven, flat, life-celebrating, no-corporate culture, and we look forward to meeting you and learning more about what you can bring to the team.
About You
You are an experienced data science leader who translates strategy into objectives, grows the people around you, and works as a strategic thought partner to senior leadership. You are also a strong individual contributor who doesn't just manage the work but does it.
You don't need glamorous problems to do great work — you find satisfaction in getting things right, shipping something that matters, and making the people around you better at their craft.
You've worked in applied data science long enough to know when to push for a more rigorous model and when to ship the first version and iterate. You can walk stakeholders through your findings and turn around and give a member of the team support and feedback that helps them grow. You bring relevant data, graphs, and other evidence to group discussions and can continue to evolve your perspective as new evidence comes in.
You think creatively about problems that don't have established solutions. You’re comfortable building from scratch, inventing new approaches, testing them quickly, and iterating to bring out the right idea. You understand that chess is a deeply data-rich domain, and ideally, you love the game. Familiarity with how chess players develop and improve, how rating systems work, the challenge of catching cheaters, and what makes a chess feature feel right, is knowledge that will compound quickly in this role.
What you'll do
- Own high-impact data science work across product data science and fair play. Create and build novel algorithms, models, and data-powered features that directly shape the chess experience for our users, from systems that protect the integrity of the game to features that make Chess.com more engaging and useful for players at every level.
- Partner across the company on product vision and execution. Work closely with product managers, engineers, designers, and writers to translate new stats and algorithms into decisions that power our next generation of features.
- Design and deploy creative heuristics, algorithms, and models that identify cheating at scale using the full depth of your statistical and data science toolkit. Raise the quality and sophistication of our approaches over time.
- Manage a lean team of data scientists. Turn strategy into clear team objectives and results, not just execute direction from leadership. Set the quality bar through your own work and give feedback that inspires teammates to do great work, not just fix the issues of the day. Help data scientists grow into scientists who can operate with more speed and independence over time.
- Communicate early and often. In a fully remote culture, proactive communication is how work actually gets done. Surface blockers before they become problems, keep stakeholders informed without being asked, and make sure your team is never left wondering where things stand.
Required Skills
- 5+ years of data science experience, with a demonstrated track record of developing algorithms and models, contributing to features that shipped, and driving real value for users.
- Strong Python and SQL skills; experience building and working within data pipelines using BigQuery and GCP or similar cloud databases & storage at scale.
- Comfortable with agentic workflows and tools (Cursor, Claude Code or similar) to accelerate research ideation and execution.
- Solid machine learning fundamentals with enough depth to contribute meaningfully to models across the chess data stack, including anomaly detection for fair play and features that support learning and understanding chess at varying rating levels.
- Proven ability to communicate findings clearly to both technical peers and senior non-technical stakeholders.
- Experience managing or meaningfully mentoring other data scientists or analysts.
- Deep familiarity with chess: you like to play, have thought about rating systems and how inflation may impact ratings at scale, want to build products that you would use yourself to further your chess journey, and have done some thinking on the cheating problem and how to detect it.
Preferred Skills
- Experience on a consumer gaming or entertainment platform where domain-specific data science is at the core of the product.
- Comfort working in lean, high-ownership team environments where being proactive is your superpower.
About the Opportunity
- This is a full-time opportunity
- We are 100% remote (work from anywhere!)
- This role is open to candidates who can work with good overlap between Eastern time through Pacific Time zones
