Head of Data Science Job San Francisco area,California USA,IT/Tech

The Role

We are seeking a dynamic,
hands-on Head of Data Science who will lead our data science and analytics organization from vision through delivery and operations This person works closely with Product, Engineering, Design, the Leadership Team, and other stakeholders, and will both set strategy and roll up their sleeves when needed to drive a fast moving, dynamic product and growing Data Science organisation in the AI era.

What you'll Do
Technical Leadership & Strategy

Define and drive the company-wide data science strategy — spanning analytics, experimentation, and applied ML/AI — end-to-end, from how raw data is collected until it’s used in user-facing features or for internal decision making.

Ensure teams at Linktree have the capabilities to make sound data-driven decisions and build the platforms and frameworks to hold teams accountable to high standards in decision making.

Build the data science foundations behind financial forecasting, and the frameworks that hold teams accountable for hitting company targets.

Advance Linktree’s transformation into an insights- and AI-powered product with a clear, differentiated value proposition for our users.

Make critical decisions on modeling approaches, experimentation infrastructure, and ML/AI systems design, ensuring they are scalable, rigorous, and production-ready.

Hands-On Execution

Contribute to major technical components, critical feature-launches, etc. and occasionally contribute insights deep dives.

Being involved in solution design for high-complexity or high-risk data or AI investments to maintain technical quality and help unblock teams.

Lead or participate in technical deep-dives, especially for cross-team initiatives or for when the design has broad implications.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

Collaborate with Engineering, Product, and Design to deeply integrate the right data capabilities into teams, ensuring data and AI are core to how we build.

Represent Data to the executive team, surface key insights, communicate technical tradeoffs, risks, and timelines in terms non-tech stakeholders understand.

Collaborate on budget, resource allocation, technology investment decisions.

Evangelize data science and AI practices both internally and externally through thought leadership like conference speaking.

Team Building, Mentorship & Management

Build, grow, and mentor senior leaders, both as managers and ICs. Ensure strong leadership across your team.

Recruit and retain top data talent, help define hiring strategy, interviewing, and onboarding.

Ensure our teams leverage data to its full potential to make sound data-driven decisions and foster a culture of learning, decision quality, ownership, psychological safety, and accountability.

Lead adoption of AI-driven tools to drive productivity and ensure we’re on the forefront of modern engineering and product building workflows.

Process, Governance & Scaling

Establish best practices across the entire data lifecycle (instrumentation, data engineering, insights, experimentation, ML and AI validation) and the frameworks to hold teams accountable to these practices.

Maintain effectiveness and reliability of AI and user-facing insights solutions by establishing monitoring, alerting and remediation processes.

Continuously partner with Product and Engineering to evaluate and evolve the cross-functional product org structure to match the company’s growth, ensuring clarity of ownership, effective collaboration, and decision-making velocity.

What Success Looks Like

Linktree has a unique value proposition in the market due to data and AI-driven capabilities.
Decision making throughout the organization is based on sound insights.
Team attrition is healthy, team members are growing in their roles and the management…