Senior Data Scientist

As a Senior Data Scientist at MarginEdge, you'll be researching, developing, and deploying innovative machine learning and statistical models that work to solve our most challenging problems. This role combines your deep technical expertise with creative problem-solving and collaboration skills. We value impact and are looking for people who are results driven and are open to exploring new and different approaches to solving problems. Our data scientists embed directly with the teams they serve, whether that's a product and engineering squad or our sales and marketing organization, and own their work end-to-end, from initial idea through deployment and operational models in our AWS infrastructure.

Some Problems Our Team Is Currently Working On

• Using probabilistic models to identify the strongest potential leads and the best time to act on them, and redesigning our sales process to take advantage of these insights.
• Designing and building a pipeline that combines classic machine learning tools with LLMs to fully configure a new client in our system based on their existing invoices, recipes, inventory sheets, menus, and more.
• Detecting anomalies in our clients' food and beverage usage and using those insights to help them take action to reduce their operating costs.
• Analyzing our client base to understand what drives retention and inform the roadmap of product improvements.

Our team solves business-critical problems by brainstorming technical approaches, prototyping different statistical and/or machine learning solutions, empirically measuring impact, and collaborating with engineers to deploy scalable solutions. We don't expect expertise in all areas of data science and recognize that different domains have unique challenges. Successful candidates should demonstrate their ability to work through the entire process above (from idea generation through release and impact assessment) on a problem relevant to their professional experience.

_While we’re open to finding the right person for the role, we’ll be prioritizing candidates in the DC metro area who are able to follow a hybrid schedule and spend time collaborating with the team at our Arlington, VA headquarters.

_MarginEdge: Where hospitality meets technology

As a team built by former (and current!) restaurant operators, our mission is to bring operators the same energy, attention to detail, and passion that they bring to their guests. Our culture is deeply rooted in service, partially because that’s where so many of our team come from (including everyone on our Business Development team), but also because we believe it is just the right way to run a business. We design our software with profound empathy for the complexity of running a restaurant, and the goal of making the magic just a little easier for operators by taking the complex (read: very annoying) back office tasks off their plate, while empowering them with real-time data.

Our founders share a deep history in both owning and operating restaurants and in building successful tech companies. We are venture-backed and serve 12,000+ restaurants across the US and Canada.

We enable restaurants to make magic while knowing we are doing the same for them.

We have the utmost respect for our clients and because of this, we are unable to hire their current employees.

Responsibilities

• Collaborate with product and other relevant stakeholders to identify areas that can benefit from data science support.
• Research, develop, and deploy machine learning models that solve complex business problems.
• Design and implement scalable data science pipelines that transform raw data into actionable insights.
• Evaluate and optimize existing models to improve accuracy and performance.
• Collaborate with engineering to implement production-ready solutions in AWS.
• Stay informed about advances in machine learning and AI technologies.
• Report on key performance metrics and present findings to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Provide feedback and mentorship to other data scientists via PR reviews, collaborative brainstorming on new problems, and regularly sharing your work and learnings with the team.

We are looking for candidates who have demonstrated professional experience with the following:

• Using Python and its associated data manipulation and data science libraries to develop solutions across a breath of problem spaces.
• Designing, implementing, and deploying machine learning models in a customer-facing application.
• Experimenting with LLMs and agentic workflows and comparing those against traditional machine learning methods.
• Communicating statistical methods to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Writing complex SQL queries to construct datasets for analysis.
• Leveraging cloud services to build machine learning workflows.
• Collaborating on code with version control systems like Git.
• Using Claude Code for data science development.

We Are Especially Interested In Hearing From Candidates Who

• Have knowledge of or experience with data science for sales and marketing.
• Are local to the DC metro area.
• Are familiar with the restaurant industry.

Compensation: The anticipated salary range for this role is $165,000 - $185,000 annually. Where a candidate falls within that range depends on a variety of factors, including experience, skills, qualifications, geographic location, and internal equity. In addition to base salary, this role may be eligible for bonus opportunities and our comprehensive benefits package.

What’s it like to work for MarginEdge?

Imagine the fun of a great restaurant - surrounded by a team of people (including some that you help to manage!) who care about hospitality, care about quality, and care about each other - then subtract the long nights, weekends, drunk customers at the bar...et voila, MarginEdge!

We work hard, we work fast and we fuel our work with a commitment of transparency from leadership, straight talk and trust between teams. We believe that the best people do their best work when they feel empowered - so whether you are remote or in our office (likely eating a catered lunch from our clients in our baller, brand new penthouse HQ in Ballston) you get to work with your manager to call your shot on what works best for you. Did we mention it has a full commercial kitchen and is walking distance (covered walking, that is) from the metro?

Benefits (Shut The Front Door, They Are Amazing)

In order to fuel this rocket ship, we need to build a team as passionate about our work and product as we are. We believe that top talent (that’s you!) should feel deeply connected to their work, appreciated for the time they give to building our organization and have the balance necessary to give their best during work hours and all those after-hours too. We do this by offering a suite of kick ass benefits not only to be competitive and catch the eye of super smart people (that’s you again!) but also provide the foundation for a career you love and a life outside of work you love just as much.

• Unlimited Paid Time Off (and we mean it, we encourage your healthy work life balance!)
• Medical, Dental, Vision, and Short/Long-Term Disability Insurance (preventative care for the win)
• Health Savings Account with employer match (dependent upon your medical plan selection)
• Commuter benefits with employer contribution (excluding limos and helos - for now)
• Generous Life Insurance Plan
• Short- and Long-term Disability
• Company-Paid Holidays
• 401(k) and matching
• Stock Options to buy into everything we are doing to support this industry
• 12-week fully Paid Parental Leave
• Lunch catered twice a week at our HQ in Arlington (we exclusively cater from our clients, too!
• A wellness program that sponsors healthy activities such as step challenges and provides discounts to gyms and fitness classes.

Oh, and our recognition in the Washington Post as a top small businesses to work for in 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025!And most important, what our customers think about our work on Capterra and _G2 Crowd.

_Our Fine Print is Bold: We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran, marital, disability status or any other characteristic protected by law. You be you. While we are proudest of our commitment to exceptional culture and creating a truly excellent work environment, we see our benefits as an extension of that belief. Our benefits package is designed to be exceptionally competitive and a reflection of our commitment to a best-in-class workplace for all.

As a team built by former (and current!) restaurant operators, our goal to bring our clients the same energy, attention to detail and passion that they give their guests. Our culture is deeply rooted in service—partially because that’s where we came from but also because we believe it's the right way to run a business. We design our software with profound empathy for the complexity of running a restaurant.

Our dream is to make the magic just a little easier for operators and their teams. We believe in crazy things like knowing how much waste your kitchen is producing and what your total spend is during the period. Solving these kinds of problems is really freaking hard to do, which is why we develop cutting-edge technology that answers these questions with data science.