Lead Data Scientist

About Marley Spoon

We’re 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 we’re 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

You’ll 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 12–18 Months, You Will

• 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 they’ll actually love, increasing first-box and repeat conversion.
• Work with Product and Design to translate model outputs into simple, intuitive experiences.
• 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.
• 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.
• Raise the bar on ML in production
• Oversee the end-to-end lifecycle of key models—from 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.
• Lead and grow a small DS/ML team
• Coach and mentor 2–3 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.
• 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 don’t say, and where uncertainty sits, so they can make better calls

You’ll 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

You’re a technically strong Data Scientist who’s already stepped into leadership and now wants a role where you can both build and shape a function.

You’ll 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 outcomes—for 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 you’ll have the option to join meet-ups in Lisbon or other hubs, but there’s no weekly office requirement.
• You’ll 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, you’ll work most closely with our Digital (Product, Design, Engineering) and Marketing teams, turning ideas into experiments and models into shipped features.

Please note: we’re currently only able to consider candidates who already have the right to work in Portugal. We’re 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.