Director - Data Science, Customer Experience

What's the position?

We're looking for a Director, Data Science, Customer Experience to lead the pillar that decides how we engage every Hard Rock Bet customer after they sign up. At HRD, customer experience is driven by CRM: the messages, offers, and journeys a player receives across onboarding, engagement, cross-sell, retention, and reactivation.

You'll own the science behind that experience, propensity and uplift models, next-best-action and offer optimization, send-time and channel decisioning, and the experimentation framework that proves what works. You'll lead a team of data scientists and applied AI engineers, and partner with CRM, VIP, Marketing, and Data Engineering to move HRD from rules-based campaigns to model-driven, increasingly automated decisioning. Success is measured in retention, engagement, cross-sell, and incremental revenue, delivered within responsible gaming commitments and state regulations.

What will you do?

• Own the Customer Experience science roadmap and KPIs end to end: strategy, modeling, delivery, and production health for all CRM decisioning models at HRD
• Lead, grow, and develop a team of data scientists and applied AI engineers, setting scientific standards and a culture of shipping measurable outcomes
• Partner with CRM and VIP to power next-best-action, offer and bonus targeting, send-time and channel optimization, and lifecycle journeys
• Drive the automation of CRM operations with AI agents and LLM workflows, in partnership with Applied AI Engineering
• Partner with Marketing and Finance to measure the incremental impact of CRM and bonus spend and reconcile it to the P&L
• Build responsible gaming and compliance guardrails into every model: exclusion logic, state-specific rules, and safe targeting constraints
• Own model monitoring, drift detection, and retraining for the pillar, in partnership with AI Ops & Observability
• Report pillar KPIs monthly to leadership and participate in annual talent and headcount planning

What are we looking for?

• 8+ years in data science or machine learning, with 3+ years leading data scientists or ML engineers and shipping production models
• Deep, hands-on expertise in CRM and lifecycle science: propensity, churn, uplift, next-best-action, offer and bonus optimization, send-time and channel optimization
• Strong experimentation and causal inference foundations: holdout design, power analysis, variance reduction, and incrementality measurement
• Experience applying LLMs and AI agents to marketing operations, from campaign generation and audience building to automated QA and journey orchestration
• Familiarity with real-time ML in production: feature pipelines, low-latency scoring, model monitoring and retraining, preferably on AWS
• Proven ability to build and scale a team: hiring, coaching, performance management, and succession planning
• Ability to turn ambiguous CRM and marketing problems into a prioritized science roadmap and communicate trade-offs to executives
• Master's or PhD in a quantitative field, or equivalent experience

Bonus points if you have:

• Experience in online gaming, sports betting, fintech, or another high-frequency consumer business
• Experience with recommendation and personalization systems that extend CRM decisioning into the product
• Familiarity with our stack or equivalents: Braze, Amplitude, Segment, Snowflake, dbt, Airflow, AWS SageMaker, Bedrock
• Experience with multi-objective optimization that balances revenue, engagement, and customer wellbeing

What's in it for you?

• Competitive pay and benefits
• Flexible vacation allowance
• Startup culture backed by a secure, global brand

Roster of Uniques

We care deeply about every interaction our customers have with us and trust and empower our staff to own and drive their experience. We foster a diverse and inclusive work environment where, regardless of background or beliefs, you feel able to be authentic and bring all your talent into play. We are an equal opportunities employer.