Principal Data Scientist (AI)

Location: Mountain View or San Diego, California, United States

Salary: $247,500–$335,000 annual base pay, with potential cash bonus, equity rewards, and benefits.

Company

Financial technology platform providing TurboTax, Credit Karma, QuickBooks, and Mailchimp to tens of millions of customers worldwide.

What you will do

• Design and ship production-grade data products and shared capabilities combining data engineering, applied AI, and analytical judgment.
• Build data architecture, semantic grounding, governed metric definitions, data quality controls, freshness guarantees, and pipelines for analytical and AI workloads.
• Define production-grade practices for data science, including testing, observability, cost awareness, graceful failure, deployment, and reuse.
• Turn one-off solutions into reusable and discoverable assets adopted by domain data science teams.
• Provide technical leadership, mentor data scientists, and influence direction across teams without direct management authority.
• Identify duplicated effort and missing foundations, prioritize high-leverage capabilities, and balance durable architecture with rapid iteration.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience across data science, data engineering, or applied machine learning, with a record of shipping production systems rather than analyses alone.
• Direct experience building data foundations and demonstrated depth in data architecture and modeling for analytical and AI products.
• Hands-on experience with modern AI tooling, including LLM-based applications, agentic workflows, and evaluation practices.
• Advanced SQL and Python skills, with strong software engineering fundamentals in version control, testing, code review, and CI/CD.
• Practical experience with distributed data processing and warehouse platforms such as Spark and Databricks, pipeline orchestration, and production deployment patterns.
• Ability to partner closely with data scientists and understand their workflows well enough to build capabilities they adopt.
• Excellent communication skills and experience influencing technical direction across teams without direct management responsibility.
• Enthusiasm for building with AI, a discipline for maintaining solid data foundations, an adoption-focused mindset, and an entrepreneurial approach to ambiguity.

Nice to have

• Familiarity with semantic layers, metric governance, or metadata systems.

Culture & Benefits

• Work in a central capability team supporting data science across the Global Business Solutions Group.
• Compensation includes performance-based rewards and may include cash bonus, equity rewards, and benefits according to applicable plans and programs.
• Base pay is determined by job-related knowledge, skills, experience, and work location.
• Fair-pay comparisons are conducted across ethnicity and gender categories.