Senior Data Scientist, Safety & Security
About this role
The Product Analytics team at the Wikimedia Foundation develops data strategies and analytics to support Wikipedia and its anti-abuse and security initiatives. The Senior Data Scientist, Safety & Security will guide product development by partnering with engineers, product managers, and the Product Safety and Integrity team to deploy machine learning and AI techniques against platform risks. Daily tasks involve analyzing large datasets, measuring the success of bot detection and anti-abuse interventions, evaluating experiments, and building automated dashboards.
This role exists to navigate the intersection of artificial intelligence and online safety for a platform reaching over a billion people monthly. Successful candidates are self-motivated data professionals who combine technical fluency in Python or R with strong communication skills, empathy for volunteer communities, and the ability to operate effectively within a complex, mission-driven non-profit environment.
What you will do
- Serve as a strategic partner for product managers, engineers, and designers across product development teams.
- Deliver accurate quantitative data and insights on a timely basis to guide product decisions and assess feature impact.
- Build and execute measurement strategies using Bayesian and Frequentist approaches to evaluate experiments.
- Develop queries and code using tools such as Spark, Presto, Hive, and Druid to work with large-scale data repositories.
- Create automated, self-service dashboards that track health and success metrics for product teams.
- Communicate data-backed recommendations clearly to cross-functional stakeholders with varying levels of technical expertise.
What you need
- Demonstrated experience with experimental design, statistics, or machine learning methods.
- Practical experience using AI coding assistants for data analysis and technical tasks.
- Fluency in R or Python along with common command-line and version control tools for modeling and reporting.
- Proficiency in SQL and working with large-scale data infrastructure like Hive, Presto, Druid, and Spark.
- Prior experience collaborating with product development teams in fast-paced environments to evaluate user-facing features.
Nice to have
- Prior experience working in trust and safety, information security, privacy, fraud, or anti-abuse.
- Exposure to ethical data management and privacy practices.
- Contributions to Wikimedia projects or other open source initiatives.
- Experience with Superset, Growthbook, or similar open-source reporting and testing tools.
Skills and tech stack
Questions candidates ask
What is the remote work policy for this role?
The Wikimedia Foundation is a remote-first organization with staff members and contractors based in over 40 countries. However, applicants must be located in specific approved US states or countries of hire, and the role requires availability for synchronous collaboration between 13:00 and 19:00 UTC.
What is the compensation range for this position?
The anticipated annual pay range for applicants based within the United States is US$ 109,563 to US$ 173,129, with individualized factors such as location and cost of living determining the final offer. For applicants located outside of the US, the pay range will be adjusted to the country of hire.
What tools and technologies will I use on the team?
You will develop queries and code using Python or R, AI coding assistants, and large-scale data tools such as Apache Iceberg, Hive, Druid, Presto, and Spark. You will also build automated dashboards and track metrics using tools like DBT, Airflow, and Superset.
What kind of projects will I work on related to safety and security?
Projects include setting the strategy for measuring bot and sockpuppetry detection efforts, providing analysis for new heuristics against abusive platform activity, and collaborating with research scientists and security engineers to evaluate AI models finding malicious user-authored code.
The application is on the official Wikimedia Foundation careers page.
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