Sr. Data Scientist, Team Lead

The Data Insights team turns DriveCentric's data into decisions. Inside the company, we give Customer Success, Sales, Marketing, Product, and the executive team trusted metrics and clear answers about how dealerships use DriveCentric and what drives retention and growth. For customers, we turn their own dealership data into insight they can act on.

The Team Lead for Data Insights builds and leads the team that delivers that vision. The role reports to the Director of Data & Analytics and leads a small team that is planned to grow. It combines people leadership with hands-on work: the lead sets the team's direction and priorities and still builds models, analyses, and pipelines alongside the team.

The team pairs applied statistics and machine learning with hands-on data engineering in SQL Server, Databricks, and PostgreSQL. It builds and deploys models, runs correlation and causal analyses, detects anomalies in customer and transaction data, and presents results in Power BI, Databricks, and in-house tools, and in conversation with the people who asked.

Understanding the question behind a request, choosing the analysis that actually answers it, and explaining the result to a non-technical audience matter as much as the modeling itself.

What You'll Do

Team leadership

• Lead, coach, and develop the Data Insights team, including regular 1:1s, goal setting, and performance feedback

• Hire and onboard new team members as the team grows, and shape the roles it needs

• Own the team's roadmap and quarterly OKRs, and tie them to the vision and department goals

• Run intake and prioritization for analytics requests, so the team works on the highest-value questions and stakeholders know what to expect and when

• Report progress, impact, and risks to the Director of Data & Analytics and department leadership

Analytics and data science

• Build, validate, and deploy machine learning models in Databricks (PySpark, Spark SQL, Delta Lake, MLflow) for forecasting, scoring, segmentation, and anomaly detection

• Run statistical analyses, including correlation, regression, hypothesis testing, cohort analysis, and time-series analysis, and state plainly what the data does and does not support

• Architect data quality frameworks in Databricks using profiling, rule-based validation, and statistical anomaly detection, and define how they move from notebooks to production jobs

• Own the ingestion and ETL pipelines and feature sets that analytics and ML workloads depend on

• Design advanced Power BI models and reports that make findings usable by people who will never open a notebook

Business partnership

• Serve as the analytical partner to Customer Success, Sales, Marketing, Product, and the executive team: understand the question behind the request, scope the analysis, and deliver a clear answer

• Present findings to technical and non-technical audiences, including executive readouts

• Turn recurring requests into self-service reporting so the team spends its time on new questions

• Build the capacity to work directly with customers on custom data projects as that need develops

Platform and cross-team work

• Partner with the Data Reliability team on the data quality improvements needed to reduce recurring issues caused by data

• Develop and maintain custom frameworks for data ingestion and transformation

• Set and follow best practices for analysis and pipeline code, and review the team's work

What We're Looking For

• 2+ years leading a data, analytics, or data science team, or leading the work of other engineers as a technical lead, including coaching, prioritization, and hiring

• 3+ years applying statistics and machine learning to business problems: regression, classification, clustering, time-series forecasting, correlation and causal analysis, hypothesis testing, and anomaly detection, with the judgment to know when each method misleads

• Hands-on experience building and deploying ML and analytics workloads in Databricks or a comparable lakehouse platform (PySpark, Spark SQL, Delta Lake, Jobs/Workflows); this is required, not preferred

• Strong Python for data science (pandas, scikit-learn, statsmodels, or equivalent) alongside SQL

• 5+ years working with SQL and database development, including 3+ years with T-SQL and Microsoft SQL Server

• Advanced Power BI development and architecture experience, and the judgment to choose the visualization that answers the question

• Track record of partnering with business teams such as Customer Success, Sales, Marketing, Product, or executive stakeholders to define the question, deliver the analysis, and drive a decision

• Excellent written and verbal communication, including explaining statistical results and their limits to non-technical audiences

• Strong understanding of ETL/ELT architectures at scale, including lakehouse patterns

• Ability to set a vision and translate it into a roadmap a small team can deliver

• Drives innovation and process enhancement

• Builds bridges across teams and departments

• Leads through challenges and setbacks

• Delivers projects on time and on quality

Additional Skills That Help

• Experience building a new team or function from an early stage: defining its scope and ways of working, growing it as demand increases

• Experience with CRM systems and automotive dealership data, or knowledge of multiple CRM providers

• Advanced Databricks experience: Unity Catalog governance, Delta Lake optimization, and MLflow model registry

• MLOps and feature store implementation

• Experiment design (A/B testing, uplift measurement) and causal inference methods

• Experience presenting to or working directly with external customers on data projects

• Experience with PostgreSQL or other database platforms

• Knowledge of AWS services (EC2, RDS, S3, CloudWatch)

• Knowledge of C# or other scripting languages

• Understanding of data governance and compliance requirements

• Performance tuning at enterprise scale

• Streaming technologies (Kafka, Spark Streaming)

• Project management certifications (PMP, Agile, Scrum)

• Competitive salary + bonus + annual merit increases
• Health, vision, and dental insurance (eligible on day 1)
• 401K with matching up to 4% (eligible after 90 days)
• 9 company holidays + 15 FTO days in first year
• Pluralsight subscription
• Professional growth opportunities
• Short/Long-Term Disability Insurance
• Employer-paid Life Insurance
• Additional Voluntary Life Insurance
• Accident Insurance
• Critical Care Insurance
• Hospital Indemnity Insurance
• Employee Assistance Program