Staff Data Scientist

About

Quora's mission is to grow the world's collective intelligence through its knowledge-sharing platform and Poe, a platform for AI language models. The Data Team at Quora is highly empowered, influencing product and company strategy directly. We aim to balance rigor and pragmatism, searching for scrappy solutions. As a Data Scientist, you will work closely with product managers, designers, engineers, and other cross-functional partners to devise measurements and metrics, design experiments, build visualizations, and tackle open-ended problems to uncover usage patterns and opportunities across Quora. This role is for the Quora product.

Responsibilities

• Own ambiguous, high-impact problem spaces across product and business domains, from question framing to analysis and solution implementation with cross-functional partners.
• Partner with cross-functional stakeholders and company leadership to shape product strategy and anticipate future challenges.
• Design and evaluate experiments to measure the impact of product and strategic changes.
• Analyze data across the product to uncover root causes of metric movements.
• Develop tools, methodologies, and frameworks to enhance the data team's and the company's data literacy.
• Multiply the impact of other data scientists through mentorship and instilling industry best practices.

Requirements

• Availability for meetings and communication during Quora’s “coordination hours” (Mon-Fri: 9am-3pm Pacific Time).
• 7+ years of work experience in an analytical or quantitative role, including 5+ as a Data Scientist or similar title, with a track record of success at a senior or staff level of scope and autonomy.
• Demonstrated ability to tackle difficult data questions requiring deep ownership of a product area and/or leading cross-functional efforts.
• Expertise with statistical techniques (e.g., regression, hypothesis testing, causal inference) and their practical application.
• Experience mentoring other data scientists and raising team standards through best practices and process improvements.
• Effective communication skills, including the ability to translate ambiguous business needs into analytical questions and explain technical results to executives and cross-functional partners.
• Extensive experience using a procedural programming language (e.g., Python, R) for data manipulation, modeling, and analysis; comfort working in a production codebase.
• Strong judgment that blends quantitative rigor with product intuition and common sense.

Preferred Requirements:

• 2+ years of experience evaluating recommender systems in offline analysis and online experiments.
• Experience setting technical direction or strategy for a team or major workstream.
• Experience with large data sets and distributed computing tools (e.g., Presto/Trino).
• Active Quora user with curiosity about the product.