Job description
Senior Data Scientist
Virta Health is pioneering a new standard of care for people to reclaim their lives. We are in the midst of a public health crisis: obesity rates are at an all-time high and over half of US adults have type 2 diabetes or prediabetes, and despite billions spent on new treatments, outcomes are largely worse. Virta reverses these diseases and delivers life-changing results by pairing individualized nutrition with ongoing care from a clinical support team. We have raised over $350 million from top-tier investors, and partner with the largest health plans, employers, and government organizations to help their employees and members restore their health and take back their lives.
Role Overview
The Advanced Analytics & AI (AAA) team is accountable for both pioneering new classes of data that power our business, and ensuring that data is powerful, clear, correct and easy to use throughout the company. The team collaborates closely with the engineering, product development, commercial, and clinical teams to transform data into actionable insights that propel Virta’s mission forward.
As a Senior Data Scientist on the AAA team, you will play a crucial role in shaping our data-driven decision making processes and in driving impactful insights that advance our mission. This role offers a unique blend of hands-on coding and strategic leadership, working closely in partnership with the Product Development group that supports adoption of our member-facing products. You will get a chance to work closely with stakeholders to create impactful data-driven reports and analyses that strengthen Virta’s value proposition.
Responsibilities
Serve as data lead for the Adoption Squad:
Understand the product – strategy, goals, roadmap, users – deeply enough to identify high-impact, strategic opportunities and risks.
Use data to steer conversations: bring data-driven hypotheses, challenge assumptions, frame trade-offs, prioritize strategically.
Translate vague product hunches into sharp analytical questions, and design the right approach to answer them.
Be the source of truth for KPIs and product metrics: help define and monitor them, and identify trends and drivers.
Drive decision making with data: Prioritize analyses that meaningfully inform product decisions and change outcomes, reframe analysis requests that won’t do that into ones that will, and design and deliver the resulting analyses properly and rapidly.
Lead experimentation thoughtfully: guide the team on when and when not to experiment, help enable self-serve experimentation, and focus on frequent, small experiments to speed learning.
Identify where product strategy and ideas could be better, more easily, or more quickly implemented with the help of AI (ML or GenAI), and help enable this integration.
Show up as a collaborative leader, not simply a service provider, and help focus work on what matters most.
Work end-to-end to translate clinical, member, and claims data from our data warehouse into actionable recommendations: work with stakeholders to design reports and dashboards that answer real business questions, design the data flows to support these, and build the required data transformation pipelines.
Must-Haves
Experience working at a digital health or similar startup, preferably during the growth phase, in order to function effectively in a fast-paced, rapidly changing environment.
7+ years of experience in a Healthcare Analytics or Data Science role, working with large datasets and conducting statistical and quantitative modeling, melding analytics with strong programming, data mining, clustering and segmentation.
5+ years of work experience working data science and visualization tools (SQL, R, and/or Python)
Advanced understanding of data storage, ETL frameworks, data transformation, and validation
Experience in building BI dashboards using tools such as Looker or Tableau
Ability to explain technology, techniques and approaches to others
Nice-to-Haves
Experience leading cross-functional efforts to build scalable systems and data pipelines, working with complex data structures
Understanding of Generative AI concepts and basic usage of GenAI tools (ChatGPT, Claude, etc.)
Experience building pipelines using dbt
Demonstrated project management experience
90 Day Plan
Within your first 90 days at Virta, we expect you will do the following:
Familiarize yourself with the Advanced Analytics & AI team roles and responsibilities. Get a pulse on team structure, key stakeholders, and areas for opportunity with an eye towards scalability and standardization.
Integrate with the Adoption Squad to understand team dynamics, analyze key product features and data pipelines, and familiarize yourself with the Squad’s product roadmap
Analyze current member journey to understand Virta’s technology ecosystem
Meet cross-functional stakeholders to understand how their business needs align with Squad and Team goals
Identify at least 1 area of opportunity to leverage GenAI to increase team efficiency or improve our processes
Teach and inspire your team members through knowledge sharing, pair programming, and giving feedback during code reviews
Values-driven culture
Virta’s company values drive our culture, so you’ll do well if:
You put people first and take care of yourself, your peers, and our patients equally
You have a strong sense of ownership and take initiative while empowering others to do the same
You prioritize positive impact over busy work
You have no ego and understand that everyone has something to bring to the table regardless of experience
You appreciate transparency and promote trust and empowerment through open access of information
You are evidence-based and prioritize data and science over seniority or dogma
You take risks and rapidly iterate
Is this role not quite what you’re looking for? Join our Talent Community and follow us on Linkedin to stay connected!
Virta has a location based compensation structure. Starting pay will be based on a number of factors and commensurate with qualifications & experience. For this role, the compensation range is $167,249 - $216,000. Information about Virta’s benefits is on our Careers page at: https://www.virtahealth.com/careers .
As part of your duties at Virta, you may come in contact with sensitive patient information that is governed by HIPAA. Throughout your career at Virta, you will be expected to follow Virta’s security and privacy procedures to ensure our patients’ information remains strictly confidential. Security and privacy training will be provided.
As a remote-first company, our team is spread across various locations with office hubs in Denver and San Francisco.
Clinical roles: We currently do not hire in the following states: AK, HI, RI
Corporate roles: We currently do not hire in the following states: AK, AR, DE, HI, ME, MS, NM, OK, SD, VT, WI.
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