Director of Data Science at Mindgruve - Brazil in São Paulo, Brazil

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The Director of Data Science heads the team that delivers, maintains, and evolves our data science solutions for clients, along with the productized models behind Sightline, our measurement and marketing intelligence solutions. This position sets the standards and governance for how the team works. The primary responsibility is to keep an established team creating, running, and improving our suite of models reliably and at scale, across regional teams in Brazil, Mexico, the US, and the Philippines.
This is a leadership role: part people leader, part methodologist, and part operator. You’ll run a team of Data Scientists, Sr. Data Scientists, ML Operations Engineers, and AI Agent Engineers with regional Data Science leads, set the standards for how models are built, validated, and reviewed, and staff client and product work across all regions from a shared pool. You’ll partner closely with our Product Strategy team, which sets product direction, and with the client service teams, who own client relationships. You’ll stay hands-on where it matters most: reviewing models, stepping in on the hardest problems, and supporting an account when a solution is challenged.
The role offers a unique opportunity to lead an established data science team across four countries, whose models run as products inside Sightline, our proprietary predictive analytics and business intelligence platform. We are seeking an experienced data science leader who has taken models from one-off analysis to repeatable, productized, solutions and wants real scope from day one.

What You'll Do Here:

Client Strategy & Leadership (40%)

• Be accountable for the quality and defensibility of every model the team ships across our proprietary machine learning suite, including:
  • Marketing and Media Mix.
  • Performance Forecasting.
  • Price Elasticity.
  • Competitive Pricing.
  • Merchandising Optimization.
  • Audience Segmentation.
  • Lift Studies.
• Manage the team through regional Data Science leads, owning performance, staffing, and day-to-day operations, including hiring and onboarding as needs arise.
  Decide how client and product work is staffed across all regional teams from a shared pool.
  Develop the team’s people and drive advancement, including preparing Sr. Data Scientists to step into Data Science lead roles.
  Own the team’s methodology standards and a shared, reusable model library.
  Own model governance: run the tiered peer review process and recommend models for sign-off.
  Own the productized model layer behind Sightline’s solutions, partnering with the Product Strategy on technical direction and turning product requirements into models that run reliably and repeatably across clients.
  Own how the team’s models are deployed, monitored, and maintained in production, leading the team’s ML Operations Engineers.
  Guide the team’s AI Agent Engineers, partnering with Product and Technology, who set direction for AI agent and LLM work.
  Serve as the senior data science voice when a solution is challenged on an account, and support account teams with additional depth when needed.
  Collaborate with Data Engineering and Technology on the data and infrastructure the team depends on.

We Need a Person With:

• Bachelor's degree in Data Science, Computer Science, Statistics, Mathematics, or a related field.
• 8+ years of experience in data science or analytics, including at least 4 years managing data scientists.
• Proven record of leading a data science team through managers or team leads and raising its methodology standards.
• Strong background in productized data science: models built, deployed, and maintained as repeatable products or platform features in a cloud environment, not only one-off analyses.
• Experience in marketing measurement, including media mix modeling, incrementality, and causal inference.
• Experience working closely with ML Operations on model deployment, monitoring, and retraining.
• Technical depth in Python and SQL to review and challenge the team’s modeling work.
• Fluency in English, written and spoken.
• Ability to work independently and as part of a collaborative team.
• Adaptability and eagerness to learn in a fast-paced environment.
• Professional and personal integrity.
• A detail-oriented mindset, focused on driving results.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills.

What We Consider as a Plus:

• Master’s degree or PhD in a quantitative field.
• Experience leading data science in an agency or client-services environment.
• Experience leading ML Operations engineers.
• Experience standing up model governance, such as peer review, validation standards, and sign-off.
• Experience with Bayesian methods, such as hierarchical models in PyMC or similar.
• Experience presenting and defending modeling results to senior client stakeholders.
• Published or presented work in marketing measurement or applied data science.
• Experience leading teams across multiple countries or time zones.
• Spoken Portuguese or Spanish.
• Experience with AI and agentic systems is a plus.