Principal Data Scientist – Business Optimization & Growth

About Zipline

Do you want to change the world? Zipline is on a mission to transform the way goods move. Our aim is to solve the world’s most urgent and complex access challenges by building, manufacturing and operating the first instant delivery and logistics system that serves all humans equally, wherever they are. From powering Rwanda’s national blood delivery network and Ghana’s COVID-19 vaccine distribution, to providing on-demand home delivery for Walmart, to enabling healthcare providers to bring care directly to U.S. homes, we are transforming the way things move for businesses, governments and consumers. The technology is complex but the idea is simple: a teleportation service that delivers what you need, when you need it. Using robotics and autonomy, we are decarbonizing delivery, decreasing road congestion, and reducing fossil fuel consumption and air pollution, while providing equitable access to billions of people and building a more resilient global supply chain.

Join Zipline and help us to make good on our promise to build an equitable and more resilient global supply chain for billions of people.

About You and The Role

Zipline is on a mission to transform how goods move by making autonomous drone delivery the fastest, most reliable, and most delightful logistics system in the world. To deliver on that promise, we need to master the data-rich, highly dynamic environment of last-mile logistics.

We’re seeking a Principal Data Scientist to lead the development of models, algorithms, and decision frameworks that drive both customer growth and business optimization. This is not a role for someone who just builds dashboards or runs ad hoc analyses — you’ll design and deploy optimization engines that directly shape customer experience, marketplace dynamics, and the economics of our business.

With 10+ years of professional experience, you’re comfortable owning ambiguous, high-stakes problems end-to-end, from problem framing through to production-ready solutions. Your work will ensure Zipline grows fast, scales efficiently, and delivers a magical experience that keeps customers coming back.

What You'll Do

• Marketplace Growth Engagement: Use statistical and optimization techniques to determine which restaurants/customers to onboard, how to present them digitally, and what mix maximizes engagement and repeat ordering.
• Pricing Capacity Optimization: Build models that set optimal prices, balance supply and demand, and define customer-facing constraints to maximize revenue while ensuring a great experience.
• Customer Experience Tradeoffs: Design frameworks that quantify the ROI of business decisions (e.g., packaging quality, delivery timeliness, customer support investment) and recommend commercial strategies.
• Marketing Analytics: Run large-scale A/B tests on customer communications, optimize marketing language and digital merchandising, and build models that accelerate customer acquisition and retention.
• Data Leadership: Partner with engineering, operations, and growth teams to embed data science into the core of decision-making across the business.

What You'll Bring

• 10+ years of professional experience, with significant work as a data scientist, optimization researcher, or applied decision scientist, ideally in last-mile delivery, e-commerce, or marketplace platforms.
• Deep expertise in applied optimization, causal inference, statistical modeling, and machine learning.
• Strong engineering skills in Python and SQL, with experience deploying algorithms into production systems.
• Track record of building and scaling experimentation platforms (A/B testing, marketplace simulations, demand forecasting).
• Business acumen and the ability to translate complex models into simple, actionable decisions for cross-functional stakeholders.
• Experience with pricing optimization, supply-demand balancing, or customer lifecycle modeling strongly preferred.
• Reliability, self-sufficiency, conscientiousness, and comfort navigating ambiguous, high-impact problems in a fast-paced environment.
• Must be eligible to work in the US.

Why This Team?

• You’ll work on problems that directly define the success of Zipline’s B2C business: how fast we grow, how efficient we are, and how magical the customer experience feels.
• Your work won’t sit on a shelf — the models you build will be deployed in production and used daily to drive millions of decisions.
• You’ll shape the data science culture at Zipline, bringing senior-level expertise to a fast-growing team.
• You’ll join a group that values rigor, speed, and creativity — solving some of the hardest optimization problems in modern logistics.

What Else You Need to Know

Zipline is an equal opportunity employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard torace, color, ancestry, national origin, religion or religious creed, mental or physical disability, medical condition, genetic information, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, and related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, military or veteran status, citizenship, or other characteristics protected by state, federal or local law or our other policies.

We value diversity at Zipline and welcome applications from those who are traditionally underrepresented in tech. If you like the sound of this position but are not sure if you are the perfect fit, please apply!