Senior Data Scientist-Intelligent Assignment Engine (Hybrid)

Job Description

Job Description

About Rewards Network

For 41 years, Rewards Network has been helping restaurants grow revenue, increase traffic, and boost customer engagement through innovative financial, marketing services, and premier dining rewards programs. By offering unique card-linked offers, we introduce diners to fantastic restaurant experiences, leveraging advanced technology and data analytics to deliver value to restaurants, diners, and our strategic partners' loyalty programs.

Our Culture

At Rewards Network, you'll be part of a driven and diverse team that excels in collaboration, issue resolution, and taking ownership of both personal growth and the company's success. We take pride in partnering with the world's most powerful loyalty programs to drive full-price paying customers to local restaurants through marketing services and flexible funding options. Our engaging and rewarding environment is designed to help you gain your full potential.

Job Overview

We're seeking a Senior Data Scientist with strong technical depth across data science, large-scale data pipelines, and production ML/data systems. Experienced leading the execution of complex data engineering and data science workstreams including batch pipelines processing hundreds of millions to billions of records, orchestration, customer segmentation, feature generation and management, and real-time or near-real-time assignment systems.

This role requires someone who is equally comfortable driving technical architecture decisions, defining and evolving data attributes and metrics, and bridging the gap between business stakeholders and the engineering and data teams. The right candidate will be able to operate as a technical lead and guide a team without formal management responsibility.

This is a hybrid position that requires in office presence 3 days a week (Tuesday-Thursday) in Chicago.

What you'll bring to the table: (Responsibilities)

Short term specific:
Oversee SLAs across the Intelligent Assignment Engine (IAE) pipeline (batch completion, feed delivery, attribute freshness, assignment turnaround) and drive activity-based classification and tiering of members and merchants, ensuring definitions, thresholds, and refresh cadences are aligned with business and downstream consumption needs.

Design and build the offer priority scoring framework used to rank eligible offers per member, including score definition, input features (member attributes, merchant attributes, behavioral signals, business priorities), weighting logic, and validation against business objectives, and evolve the scoring model as personalization and ML capabilities mature.

• Provide technical leadership and execution guidance across the IAE pipeline, including nightly batch assignment processing, member and merchant attribute management, eligibility evaluation logic, and S3-based data feed production
• Lead the design, generation, and ongoing management of customer segmentation and feature pipelines, including member group construction, attribute bucketing strategy, and the production of feature sets used for offer eligibility evaluation and targeting
• Lead the design and optimization of large-scale data processing workflows handling hundreds of millions to billions of records, including partitioning strategy, bulk ingestion, and performance tuning
• Own the evolution of the IAE attribute pipeline including member and merchant attribute design, metric definition, bucketing strategy, and ongoing quality validation, and drive alignment with business stakeholders on open decisions (tier boundaries, bucket values, time windows, metric design)
• Provide architectural guidance on the development of a real-time synchronous API layer for offer assignment, including near-real-time member enrollment and user-triggered assignment events, and ensure sound integration with the broader batch pipeline
• Oversee the analytics mart maintenance and incremental build-out post-MVP, ensuring data models remain accurate, performant, and aligned with evolving reporting needs
• Act as the primary technical bridge between business stakeholders (product, marketing, finance) and the IAE/data engineering team, translating business requirements into data pipeline and attribute requirements and translating data constraints back into business-legible terms
• Guide and review the work of junior data scientists and data engineers on the IAE team, providing technical direction and prioritization support without formal people management responsibility
• Collaborate with the Nova platform team and engineering to ensure IAE outputs meet downstream data contracts, S3 feed schemas, and serve the offer assignment pipeline reliably
• Define and maintain data contracts between IAE and downstream consumers (Nova, analytics marts, dashboards)
• Identify and surface data quality risks, pipeline gaps, and go-live readiness issues across IAE's attribute and assignment outputs
• Build and maintain documentation of IAE architecture, data models, pipeline logic, attribute definitions, and feature generation processes to reduce key-person dependency and support team continuity
• Contribute to the future development of offer personalization and recommendation capabilities, including A/B testing frameworks, behavioral modeling from member dining habits, and an informed point of view on how ML and generative AI approaches can evolve the assignment and eligibility engine over time.
  

Do you have the right mix of ingredients: (Requirements)

• Master's degree in data science or related field
• 5+ years of experience in a data science role
• Proven ability to define and operate pipeline SLAs and data freshness guarantees, including monitoring, alerting, and incident response for batch and near-real-time data workflows.
• Demonstrated track record designing activity-based segmentation and tiering frameworks (e.g., RFM-style models, engagement tiers, merchant activity classifications), including threshold definition, refresh cadence design, and validation against business outcomes.
• Hands-on background designing and implementing scoring, ranking, or recommendation frameworks, including feature selection, weighting strategies (rule-based, heuristic, and/or ML-driven), and evaluation against business objectives; familiarity with evolving such systems from deterministic scoring toward ML-based personalization.
• Strong technical foundation across data science and data engineering; this is not a purely analytical role and the person must be comfortable owning and directing production pipeline work
• Proven experience designing and managing customer segmentation pipelines and feature generation at scale, including the construction and lifecycle management of member groups, derived attributes, and reusable feature sets
• Experience designing and leading large-scale data processing systems (hundreds of millions to billions of records), including batch pipeline architecture, partitioning, staging, and performance optimization
• Experience with workflow orchestration (Airflow/MWAA or equivalent) and AWS data services (S3, Glue, Aurora/PostgreSQL)
• Strong SQL and Python skills; ability to review, guide, and produce production-quality data pipeline code
• Understanding of event-driven architectures and Kafka-based data replication patterns
• Experience with or strong understanding of real-time or near-real-time data systems and ability to provide architectural guidance even if not the primary builder
• Ability to design, define, and document data attributes, metrics, and eligibility logic from business requirements
• Experience working with large-scale member or customer data in a personalization, targeting, loyalty, or recommendation context
• Demonstrated ability to work cross-functionally and influence without authority; comfortable in stakeholder-facing conversations and capable of holding a business conversation and a technical one in the same meeting
• Self-directed and autonomous; able to own a workstream end-to-end and provide leadership direction to others with minimal oversight
• Strong written and verbal communication; able to produce clear documentation and present findings to non-technical audiences

Nice to Have:

• Experience with offer, loyalty, dining, or hospitality platforms
• Familiarity with Scala or JVM-based systems, particularly in the context of real-time API or microservice architectures that the data pipeline integrates.
• Experience with analytics engineering (dbt or similar) or oversight of BI data model layers
• Familiarity with CDC-based replication patterns and data synchronization between systems
• Familiarity with ML model deployment and serving (AWS SageMaker, Bedrock, or equivalent), A/B testing frameworks, and an understanding of how foundation models and RAG-based architectures can be applied to personalization and recommendation use cases at scale. This is a direction the platform is moving toward and the right candidate will have an informed point of view on it.

Tech Stack:

• Aurora (PostgreSQL) / SQL
• Python
• AWS (S3, Glue, Redshift, CloudWatch, MSK)
• Airflow (MWAA)
• Kafka / Kafka Connect
• Scala / Kubernetes: familiarity and architectural awareness required; not expected to be the primary builder

What you'll love about us:

Comprehensive benefits package, which includes:

• This is a full-time, exempt position. The base salary range for this role in Chicago is $135,000–$150,000 annualized, depending on level, candidate experience, skills, and other factors. This role is also eligible for an annual bonus target of 10%, bringing total target compensation to $148,500–$165,000.
• Competitive Time Off Benefits: including flexible PTO, 11 company holidays, and parental leave.
• Generous dining reimbursement when you dine with our restaurant clients
• 401(k) plan with a company match
• Two medical plan options- Standard PPO or High Deductible Health Plan (HSA with company match for HDHP participants)
• Partnership with Rx n Go, offering certain prescriptions for free
• Two dental plan options and a vision plan
• Flexible Spending Accounts and a pre-tax commuter benefit program
• Accident, Critical Illness, and Hospital Indemnity Insurance Plans
• Short Term and Long Term disability
• Company-paid life insurance and AD&D insurance, supplemental employee, spouse, and child life insurance
• Employee Life Assistance Program
• Hybrid working environment in a new office space downtown near the Metra Train stations and catered lunches on Tuesdays.

Rewards Network is an Equal Opportunity Employer (EOE). We encourage and strongly support workplace diversity.

Expected Pay Range $135,000—$150,000 USD