Lead Data Scientist (AI/ML)

Location: Walnut Creek, California, United States

Department: Engineering

About GatherUp

Customers don't window shop anymore. They search, compare, and decide online.

GatherUp helps elevate honest businesses in local search, ensuring these businesses show up, stand out, and win by strengthening their online presence leveraging reviews and customer experience feedback. Our AI-powered platform transforms customer signals into trust, visibility, and growth.

GatherUp is owned by Insight Integrity, a holding company focused on trust technology and digital integrity. Its portfolio includes The Transparency Company, an AI-powered review verification and protection platform, and GatherUp.

Mission

As Lead Data Scientist at GatherUp, you’ll own the design and development of AI/ML models that help shape the integrity of online commerce for local businesses.

This is a high-impact, hands-on role at the intersection of NLP, machine learning, and generative AI. You’ll partner closely with engineering, product, and business stakeholders to build systems that help accomplish our mission, vision and business objectives.

What You’ll Do

• Build AI/ML solutions end-to-end: design, data preparation, feature engineering, model selection, finetuning, training, deploying, validation/testing, and performance analysis
• Ensure models are scalable, monitored, and continuously improved in production
• Create reproducible training and evaluation pipelines (versioning, experiment tracking, robust validation, clear documentation).
• Use behavioral, textual, and statistical signals to identify, monitor and detect anomalies and emerging patterns in data
• Apply NLP techniques to analyze unstructured text and surface patterns at scale
• Conduct exploratory research and data analysis to identify trends
• Partner with engineering, product, and business teams to translate requirements into product
• Communicate model behavior, trade-offs, and impact clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences

What Success Looks Like

• Models are deployed, monitored, and demonstrably improving over time
• Capabilities scale with business growth and adapt to new threat vectors
• You’ve established data science best practices that raise the bar for the whole team

Who You Are

• 3+ years of experience in data science, machine learning, or a related field
• Demonstrate fluency with modern deep learning concepts, including transformer fundamentals and LLM pre-training vs post-training concepts
• Proven track record of building and deploying ML models in production environments
• Strong experience with NLP and unstructured text data
• Proficiency in Python and SQL
• Experience training NLP models using ML frameworks and architectures such as PyTorch and RoBERTa
• Experience fine-tuning LLMs for production use cases
• Experience building and deploying RAG pipelines
• Ability to communicate complex model behavior to non-technical stakeholders
• Strong ownership mindset — you drive projects end-to-end and hold yourself accountable to outcomes
• Bonus points if you have: a Master's degree in a quantitative discipline (e.g. Data Science, Computer Science, Statistics, Engineering, or related); experience in and passion for fraud detection, trust & safety, or review/content integrity

Why GatherUp

• Your work directly supports the economic prosperity of local businesses and the future of local commerce
• Clear expectations, real ownership, and performance-based upside
• A fast-moving team where strong execution is recognized and rewarded

What We Offer

• Competitive Compensation: $140K–$180K (base salary + bonus) + Equity
• Full Benefits: 100% covered medical, dental, and vision
• 401(k) Match: Invest in your future with company matching
• Flexible vacation policy
• Annual L&D stipend and continuous training and development opportunities
• Company laptop provided

Location

• We are a remote-friendly company, but ideally this role is hybrid based in our office in Walnut Creek, CA.