Senior Data Scientist

About Phaedon

Phaedon is a leading loyalty partner for organizations across travel, hospitality, and retail, helping brands humanize loyalty by transforming customer interactions into meaningful, lasting relationships. Through innovative technology, strategic expertise, and advanced analytics, Phaedon delivers end-to-end loyalty solutions that generate measurable business outcomes. Its award-winning Tally™ platform enables organizations to scale loyalty with precision, deepen customer engagement, and strengthen connection at every stage of the relationship. Trusted by leading and growth-focused brands, Phaedon helps clients turn loyalty into a sustained driver of growth and long-term competitive advantage. Learn more at wearephaedon.com.

About the Role:

We are looking for a Senior Data Scientist who is a builder, not just a maintainer. This is a high-ownership opportunity for an AI/ML engineer who wants to design and ship the models that power our loyalty platform in production, not just prototype them. You'll build AI/ML capabilities that our SaaS product calls at runtime: fraud detection, personalization, recommendation, and forecasting models served through APIs, not one-off notebooks handed to someone else to productionize.

We're looking for a self-starter who identifies opportunities to apply AI/ML to the product roadmap, proposes the approach, builds it, ships it, and owns it in production. The primary focus of this role is product-embedded model development. There will be some client-facing work; however, it is anticipated to be a small portion of the role.

Essential Duties/Responsibilities:

Product-Embedded Model Development (primary focus):

Design, build, and own AI/ML models that are directly integrated into and called by our SaaS product in production

Own the full model lifecycle: problem framing, data/feature design, training, evaluation, deployment as a callable service, and post-deploy monitoring/retraining

Build and maintain production inference APIs and microservices that serve model predictions to the product with defined latency and reliability SLAs

Implement and productionize models using AWS Bedrock, SageMaker, and other AWS AI services, going beyond POC into hardened, versioned, production systems

Develop RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) systems and other LLM-powered features as first-class product capabilities

Proactively identify where AI/ML can create product differentiation (fraud detection, member behavior prediction, personalization/recommendation, anomaly detection) and bring proposals forward rather than waiting for requirements to be handed down

Cloud Infrastructure & MLOps:

Build and manage SageMaker training pipelines, model registry, and endpoint deployments, including feature store integration and automated retraining triggers

Build automation, monitoring, and alerting for production ML systems using Lambda and other AWS services

Create and maintain Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation) for all model and pipeline infrastructure, no manual, undocumented deployments

Build data pipelines that synthesize complex datasets from multiple sources into model-ready features

Develop CI/CD pipelines for automated deployment and model versioning; implement model registry and rollback practices

Implement error-proofing, integration testing, and monitoring/logging for AI systems running in production

Client & Cross-Functional Collaboration:

Support select client engagements where deep technical model expertise is needed to scope or validate an AI/ML approach

Partner with product and analytics leadership to translate roadmap priorities into shipped model capabilities

When client-facing, present technical findings and recommendations with clarity to both technical and business stakeholders

Location:

This role is based out of our office in the Designer’s Guild building in the heart of Minneapolis' North Loop neighborhood. We embrace a hybrid model with three in-office days per week to ensure a mix of collaboration and flexibility to support our employees' success.

Basic Qualifications:

Bachelor's degree in data science, computer science, computer engineering, or related field AND 5+ years of hands-on experience building and shipping ML models into production systems OR equivalent combination of education and experience

Demonstrated track record of taking a model from idea to production-serving endpoint inside a live product, not just research/POC work; be prepared to speak to specific systems you built that are running in production today

Fluency in the full model lifecycle: data/feature engineering, training, evaluation, deployment, versioning, monitoring, and retraining

Knowledge of Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation) for deploying ML infrastructure repeatably

Experience with source control and automated deployment pipelines (Git, Docker)

A demonstrated self-starter mindset: comfortable identifying a product opportunity, scoping the technical approach, and driving it to completion with minimal guidance

Strong written and verbal communication skills to document and present technical approaches to engineering and product stakeholders

Technical Skills:

Programming: Advanced Python (including AI/ML libraries like transformers, LangChain), SQL, Boto3

AI/ML Tools: AWS Bedrock, SageMaker, prompt engineering, model fine-tuning

Cloud Services: AWS services, particularly Bedrock, SageMaker, Lambda, Redshift, Athena, and Glue

Visualization: Experience with Superset, Tableau, and/or Power BI

Development Practices: Object-oriented programming, testing frameworks, CI/CD, model versioning

Preferred Skills:

Direct experience building models that are embedded in and called by a live SaaS product (recommendation engines, fraud/anomaly detection, personalization, forecasting, chatbots)

Experience with vector databases and RAG implementations in production

Knowledge of LLM fine-tuning, evaluation, and deployment strategies at scale

Strong MLOps background: model versioning, automated retraining, drift detection, canary/shadow deployments

Experience with API development and microservices architecture in a product engineering context

Background in fraud detection, loyalty/rewards platforms, or marketing/AdTech modeling a plus

Prior experience balancing product engineering with occasional client-facing technical work

What we Offer:

We value our employees and demonstrate this through our comprehensive benefits offering including medical/dental/vision coverage, comprehensive paid time off, paid holidays, paid parental leave, retirement savings plans, and more.

Please note that the company does not offer sponsorship of employment visas for this role (e.g., H1B, 0-1, TN, CPT, OPT, etc.). To be considered for this opportunity, candidates must be currently authorized to work in the United States on a permanent, unrestricted basis.

Pay Range:

The pay range for this position is estimated to be: $105,000-155,000 per year.

There are multiple factors that are considered in determining final pay for a position, including, but not limited to, relevant work experience, skills, certifications and competencies that align to the specified role, geographic location, education and certifications as well as contract provisions regarding labor categories that are specific to the position.

The statements contained in this job description reflect general details as necessary to describe the principal functions of this job, the level of knowledge and skill typically required and the scope of responsibility. It should not be considered an all-inclusive listing of work requirements. Individuals may perform other duties as assigned, including work in other functional areas to cover absences, to equalize peak work periods, or to otherwise balance organizational workload.