Senior Data Scientist, Retention & Product

About CookUnity:

Food has lost its soul to modern convenience. And with it, it has lost the power to nourish, inspire, and connect us. So in 2018, CookUnity was founded as the first-of-its-kind platform that connects the world with the source of truly great food: chefs. Today, CookUnity delivers 50 million meals a year from the industry’s best chefs to homes all over the country. Fresh. Ready-to-eat. And crafted with the passion that nourishes body and soul.

Unwilling to stop there, CookUnity is expanding beyond delivery to become an ever-innovating marketplace focused on our singular mission: empower Chefs to nourish the world.

If that mission has you hungry in more ways than one, you’ve found the right job posting.

The role:

We're hiring an ML-focused Data Scientist to own retention and churn for CookUnity. In a weekly subscription business, retention is the engine of growth — the gap between a healthy customer and a churned one is often just a few weeks of activity. Your job is to predict who's at risk, understand why they leave, and power the interventions that keep customers ordering and win back the ones who go. This is a hands-on role embedded with Product, CRM, Marketing, and Engineering.

Responsibilities:

• Churn & retention modeling: Build churn/survival models and lifecycle-state models that flag at-risk customers early and anticipate where each customer is heading.
• Intervention & reason understanding: Power the retention interventions that act on that risk — save flows, skip/pause deflection, lifecycle messaging — and classify why customers churn so the response fits the reason rather than being generic.
• Resurrection & win-back: Develop propensity models and personalized experiences that bring churned customers back.
• Personalization & Next-Best-Action: Decide the right action, offer, and message per customer across product surfaces, with an uplift layer measuring incremental impact.
• Offer & promo optimization: Determine who gets an incentive, when, and at what value — maximizing retained revenue without over-discounting.
• Production & MLOps: Own the full model lifecycle and ship models into the systems where they act; handle monitoring, retraining, and drift.
• Experimentation & incrementality: Design experiments and uplift measurement so we intervene on movable customers and not on those who'd retain anyway.

Qualifications:

• 5-8+ years in data science, applied ML, or statistics, shipping production models.
• Retention/churn depth: churn prediction, survival / time-to-event modeling, and lifecycle-state models in a subscription or recurring-revenue context.
• Causal & experimentation rigor: uplift/incrementality measurement and A/B testing, with the judgment to separate true impact from selection effects.
• End-to-end ML & MLOps: building, validating, and deploying models in production (CI/CD, registries, containerization, orchestration, monitoring).
• Engineering & tooling: strong Python (pandas, scikit-learn, gradient boosting; deep learning a plus), SQL, code hygiene and reproducibility.
• Collaboration: excellent communication; able to embed with Product/CRM/Marketing and turn models into decisions.
• Education: BS in a quantitative field required; MS/PhD preferred.
• Ability to leverage generative AI to increase output quality and speed.

Preferred requirements:

• Subscription marketplaces, food-tech, or consumer marketplaces with a retention mandate.
• Lifecycle-state / Hidden Markov models for churn.
• Causal and uplift libraries (e.g. EconML) or survival-modeling packages.
• Recommenders, embeddings, or personalization for retention and win-back.

Learn More About CookUnity

We believe great leadership starts with alignment on vision, values, and ways of working. To give you deeper insight into who we are and what we’re looking for, we invite you to explore: CookUnity's Leadership Principles – The values and behaviors that guide how we operate, collaborate, and scale.

We hope this provides valuable insight into our culture and product vision. If this excites you, we’d love to connect!

Benefits

🩺  Health Insurance coverage

🌅 401k Plan

⛱ Unlimited PTO

🗓️ 5- year Sabbatical: After 5 years with CookUnity, you get a 4-week paid sabbatical

🐣 Paid Family leave

🕯 Compassionate Leave: 3-5 days each time the need arises

🥘 A generous amount of CookUnity credits to enjoy our amazing meals, added to your account, monthly

🤖 AI-forward workplace: enterprise access to ChatGPT and Claude to help you work smarter and grow faster.

🧘🏽‍♀️ Wellness perks: access to fitness subsidies to build a healthy lifestyle

👩🏾‍🏫 Personalized Spanish coach

🚀 Awesome opportunity to join a company that is looking to change how we eat and how chefs work!

Compensation

All final pay rates will be determined by candidates experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities of the applicant, internal equity, and alignment with market data.

Pay Range for this position

$160,000—$195,000 USD

If you’re interested in this role, please submit your application, and if we think you might be a fit, we'll get in touch with you. Thank you for your time!

CookUnity is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are dedicated to creating a community of inclusion and an environment free from discrimination or harassment. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, citizenship status, protected veteran status, genetic information, or physical or mental disability.

A quick note for all candidates
We’ve recently seen an increase in recruitment scams across the industry, and we want to make sure you (and your data) stay safe while applying to CookUnity. We also want you to know that we take this seriously — sometimes, as part of our process, we may ask for a brief “proof of humanity” to confirm that we’re connecting with a real person, not an impersonator. Here are a few tips to help you protect yourself and know what to expect from us:

• Apply only through our official channels. All open roles are listed on our official careers page: careers.cookunity.com
• Our recruiters are real people — and easy to verify. You can always find them on LinkedIn with verified profiles. If you’re unsure, feel free to reach out to us on our official LinkedIn Company Page.
• We only communicate through official CookUnity channels. That means emails ending in @cookunity.com and interviews held through official company platforms (Google Meet or Zoom) — never WhatsApp, Telegram, or SMS.
• We’ll never ask for payment or personal financial details. If anyone does, please don’t share any information and let us know right away.

If something ever feels off or you’re unsure about a message, we’d much rather you double-check with us. You can always contact us directly through any of our social media channels. We appreciate your interest in joining CookUnity — and we care about keeping your experience (and safety) as genuine as possible.