Senior Data Scientist

Roark is an Atlanta-based private equity firm with over $41 billion in assets under management. Roark focuses on investments in consumer and business service companies, with a specialization in franchise and franchise-like business models. Roark prides itself on being a trusted partner for management and business owners. We believe that successful partnerships begin with providing a compelling value proposition to all business constituencies.

A win‑win‑win approach leads to a positive business environment where all stakeholders – customers, employees, franchisees, strategic partners, service providers, management and shareholders – share in the growth and success of our businesses. We want to partner with entrepreneurs and executives who share this vision. Roark brands generate approximately $100 billion in annual system revenues from 117,000+ locations located in 50 states and 120 countries.

Our portfolio companies span multiple industries including food, restaurants, consumer and business services, health, wellness and fitness, and education and youth activities. We are best known for our portfolio companies such as, Dunkin', Jimmy John's, Jamba, Orange theory, Mathnasium, Drybar just to name a few. Roark is growing our in-house Data and Analytics team, with the goal of better leveraging advanced analytics, data science, and machine learning to make sound investment decisions and guide our owned businesses to profitable growth.

We are seeking a Senior Data Scientist to ship production-grade models and tools across Roark investment use-cases and our brands. We are a fast-paced, growing, and entrepreneurial team, and this role will enjoy working across many topics and brands as we build durable competitive advantage in how we underwrite investments and scale portfolio performance.

This is a hands-on, senior individual-contributor role for a generalist data scientist with strong MLOps and software-engineering depth. Typical work spans regression modeling, demand forecasting, customer and unit economics modeling, pricing and promotion analytics, classification problems, and GenAI productivity tooling. You will own models end-to-end — from framing the problem through deployment, monitoring, and maintenance, in addition to taking existing models built by others and transforming them into to be more reusable and/or put into production.

We want a self-sufficient developer who raises the craft of the people around them. The team will look to this individual to help up-level their capabilities. The ideal candidate is comfortable across a wide variety of tasks, gets up to speed on a new project quickly, and adds value in an agile fashion. They work in an 80/20 style and do not need the perfect dataset to get started.

This role partners closely with investment teams, our owned businesses, and Data & Software Engineering to deliver scalable, production-ready solutions that drive real business impact. This position is expected to be in-office to support collaboration and culture building.

• Own machine learning models end-to-end — build, deploy, monitor, and maintain them in production, including forecasting, regression, and classification, beyond proof-of-concept
• Translate ambiguous business problems into well-defined modeling approaches and data requirements, working in an 80/20 style without waiting for a perfect dataset
• Write clean, tested, reusable Python; participate in code review; and apply strong software craft, including Git and packaging
• Deploy and operate models on the cloud (Google Cloud Platform preferred — Vertex AI, Big Query, Cloud Run), applying MLOps fundamentals: CI/CD for ML, reproducibility, deployment, and monitoring
• Raise the engineering and modeling standards of those around you — teaching craft and lifting team quality, not only your own output
• Partner directly with investment teams, owned-business stakeholders, and internal clients to deliver analysis and tools that drive decisions
• Author reusable IP — internal libraries, templates, and standards documentation — that scales across Roark's businesses and target sectors
• Get up to speed quickly on new projects and…