Senior Data Scientist - Platform Economics & Simulation

Role Overview

At Play Station, Data Science plays a critical role in shaping how we invest in, retain, and delight our global player base. Understanding why players spend, stay, and engage is a complex causal problem. The Player Value Science team exists to solve this problem by explaining what drives value, where it is created or missed, and what to change, so growth can be created and protected.

This role is the causal and economic core of that mission. The work involves explaining the economics of the platform (revenue, retention, engagement) and building simulation and offline‑evaluation tooling that lets us test decision policies before scaling them.

Explain why value moves across revenue, retention, and engagement through value decomposition, cannibalisation and substitution analysis, meta‑analysis across models, and clear strategic trade‑off framing.

Apply causal reasoning to understand our own models and players: why a model behaves as it does, whether an observed effect is incremental or displaced, and what genuinely drives lifetime value.

Build offline policy evaluation and simulation tooling that lets the platform identify the content, players, and policies that create incremental value, and stress‑test decision policies before they scale.

Guide model development across the team, raising the standard of causal and economic thinking through review, mentoring, and example.

Turn causal understanding into concrete proposals, and respond with rigorous answers when the platform needs them.

Communicate assumptions, methods, and conclusions clearly enough that senior technical and commercial audiences can act on them with confidence.

• You think in counterfactuals, separating incremental effect from what would have happened otherwise, and reasoning naturally about substitution, cannibalisation, and the economics of a content platform.
• Background in economics, econometrics, or a similarly causal quantitative discipline.
• Proven industry experience turning causal and economic understanding into decisions that changed commercial outcomes (e.g., customer value, retention, pricing, decisioning).
• Depth in causal methods used to explain and understand systems: treatment‑effect estimation, uplift, structural or counterfactual reasoning.
• Ability to build, not just analyse: you can implement models, simulation, or offline‑evaluation environments and take them to production.
• Strong judgement on when a sophisticated approach is warranted versus a simpler one that answers the question.
• Experience owning ambiguous problems end‑to‑end: framing the question, choosing the approach, and delivering something the business acts on.
• Fluency with large, complex behavioural datasets and the craft to work with them at scale:
  Python, SQL, and distributed processing (e.g. PySpark), plus standard ML tooling as required.
• Excellent stakeholder communication: you can make a rigorous causal argument land with a non‑technical commercial audience and move a decision.
• Strong quantitative academic background, typically a Master's or PhD.
• Nice to Have:
  Experience with incrementality and uplift modelling, or with experimentation frameworks.
• Nice to Have:
  Reinforcement learning or contextual‑bandit decisioning, and offline evaluation for recommendation or decisioning systems.
• Nice to Have:
  Background in gaming, e‑commerce, or subscription businesses.
• Nice to Have:
  Experience deploying and maintaining business‑critical or consumer‑facing models.
• Nice to Have:
  Experience working in agile, fast‑paced environments.

Equal Opportunity Statement:
Sony is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All persons will receive consideration for employment without regard to gender (including gender identity, gender expression and gender reassignment), race (including colour, nationality, ethnic or national origin), religion or belief, marital or civil partnership status, disability, age, sexual orientation, pregnancy, maternity or parental status, trade union membership or membership in any other legally protected category.

We strive to create an inclusive environment, empower employees and embrace diversity. We encourage everyone to respond. Sony Interactive Entertainment is a Fair Chance employer and qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records will be considered for employment.