Senior Data Scientist, Distribution & Partnerships

Yahoo serves as a trusted guide for hundreds of millions of people globally, helping them achieve their goals online through our portfolio of iconic products. For advertisers, Yahoo Advertising offers omnichannel solutions and powerful data to engage with our brands and deliver results.

About the Team

The Yahoo homepage is one of the most visited destinations on the internet. Our Yahoo News Group Analytics Team is the engine that powers its evolution, using rigorous experimentation and advanced analytics to improve the daily habits of millions of users. We are a high-autonomy team that values statistical integrity, clear communication, and an AI-forward approach to solving complex product problems.

About the Role

We are hiring a Senior-level Data Scientist to lead analytics for  News Group distribution and syndication partnerships. In this role, you will define how we measure the success of distribution deals - across carriers, OEMs, and browsers - and build the analytical foundation that informs both how we manage existing partnerships and where we pursue new ones.

You will partner closely with Business Development, Product, and Engineering to evaluate partnership performance and surface market opportunities. On the BD side, your role is highly strategic and analytical - conducting market landscape analysis to identify distribution whitespace, size opportunities, and deliver prioritized, data-backed targets that the BD team can act on. This is greenfield work within our domain: you will be expected to bring order to highly ambiguous environments, formulate new measurement frameworks from scratch, and ensure key decisions are grounded in rigorous analysis.

This is a hands-on senior individual contributor role with significant ownership. You will operate as the analytical lead for your area, bringing structure to highly ambiguous problems and ensuring decisions are grounded in rigorous analysis. The person best suited for this role will be comfortable operating without a playbook. You've worked in environments where the right metrics weren't obvious and had to be earned through stakeholder alignment and analytical judgment - not just inherited.

You understand that partnerships are not one-size-fits-all, and you have the instincts to figure out what "good" looks like for each one. You're equally at home doing deep quantitative analysis and sitting in a BD conversation translating ambiguous business goals into measurable outcomes.

Note:

This role is focused on product and partnership analytics. It is not an ML engineering role - you will not be responsible for building or product ionizing machine learning systems.

Responsibilities:

• Define and own the measurement frameworks for distribution and syndication partnerships - identifying the right metrics for each deal type and building the infrastructure to track them reliably.
• Evaluate partnership performance end-to-end, from pre-deal sizing and goal-setting through ongoing measurement and post-mortem analysis.
• Conduct market landscape analysis to map the distribution ecosystem, identify coverage gaps and whitespace, and deliver prioritized opportunity assessments that inform BD targeting and partnership strategy.
• Support the Business Development team with data-driven analysis: sizing potential partners and modeling expected impact to frame the analytical case for pursuing or passing on deals.
• Influence product strategy and roadmap through data-driven storytelling, partnering closely with Product, Engineering, and Business Development.
• Conduct deep-dive analyses to identify growth opportunities and surface insights that wouldn't emerge from standard reporting.
• Apply advanced statistical methods (e.g., regression, cohort analysis, causal inference) to understand how distribution channels drive user behavior and long-term retention.
• Build dashboards and scalable data assets that enable self-service analytics for partnership and BD stakeholders.
• Partner with Data Engineering to build reliable, scalable datasets that serve as sources of truth for partnership data.
• Lead AI-augmented analytical workflows - leveraging tools like Gemini or Copilot - to automate routine…