Lead Data Scientist

Who We Are

At Apartment List, we're transforming how people rent—making it smarter, easier, and a lot less frustrating. Our platform has already matched over 1.4 million renters with their next home, while helping properties fill units with the right residents.

The Opportunity

Apartment List is looking for a Lead Data Scientist to build, deploy, and improve machine learning models that power our two-sided rental marketplace. You'll work on meaningful data science problems across demand- and supply-side modeling — from renter acquisition and intent signals to ranking, personalization, and marketplace optimization. You'll take ownership of projects end-to-end, from problem framing through production launch and measurement, and collaborate closely with Product, Engineering, and Analytics.

Our Data Science team has delivered 40%+ incremental revenue growth through rigorously A/B tested machine learning models — and there's still a tremendous amount of opportunity ahead.

What you'll do

• Translate customer, marketplace, and business problems into clear ML objectives, features, models, and measurement plans.
• Build, deploy, and iterate on production ML models across ranking, personalization, renter intent, demand-side acquisition, and supply-side optimization.
• Own projects end-to-end — from feature engineering and model development through A/B experimentation, launch, and monitoring.
• Apply a strong statistical mindset to model development, evaluation, causal inference, and tradeoff analysis.
• Partner with Product, Engineering, and Analytics to align on success metrics, deployment plans, and downstream impact.
• Communicate technical findings and model tradeoffs clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Leverage AI tools to improve your productivity across coding, analysis, documentation, and workflow automation.

Must-haves

• 4+ years of industry experience developing and deploying machine learning models in production, end-to-end.
• A degree in Data Science, Computer Science, Mathematics, Statistics, Economics, Physics, or a related quantitative field.
• Deep proficiency in Python and SQL, with comfort across the full model development lifecycle.
• Familiarity with standard ML libraries and frameworks such as scikit-learn, XGBoost, TensorFlow, PyTorch, or similar.
• Experience working with cloud platforms (GCP preferred but not required).
• Strong grounding in statistical learning, experimental design, and model evaluation.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience in a two-sided marketplace or multi-stakeholder environment.
• Background in recommendation systems, ranking, personalization, or search.
• Familiarity with MLOps practices, model monitoring, Airflow, dbt, or similar infrastructure.

Pay Range

• Zone 1: $189,000 - $230,000 TTC (including $170,000 - $202,000 base salary) + equity
• Zone 2: $175,000 - $212,000 TTC (including $158,000 - $186,000 base salary) + equity
• Zone 3: $161,000 - $195,000 TTC (including $145,000 - $172,000 base salary) + equity