Senior Data Scientist, Yahoo Games

Yahoo serves as a trusted guide for hundreds of millions of people globally, helping them achieve their goals online through our portfolio of iconic products. For advertisers, Yahoo Advertising offers omnichannel solutions and powerful data to engage with our brands and deliver results.

About the Role
Yahoo Games is seeking a Senior Data Scientist to serve as the strategic analytics expert for our fast-growing gaming platform. This isn’t just about crunching numbers—it’s about understanding player behavior, crafting actionable stories from data, and guiding product, design, and engineering decisions that power engaging, monetizable gaming experiences.

You’ll be embedded with key stakeholders across Yahoo Games, focusing on high-impact analysis, experimentation, and metric innovation—steering strategy for user acquisition, retention, monetization, and cross-game engagement. As the go-to data partner, you’ll drive deep player segmentation, analyze in-game economy trends, and deliver insights that shape the future of Yahoo Games.

This is a highly visible, individual contributor role for someone who is hands-on, analytical, and driven by results. This position requires a self-starter who thrives in dynamic environments, is comfortable navigating ambiguity, and excels at independently managing complex analytical projects from inception to impact.

You'll influence product direction through experimentation, advanced modeling, and behavioral research—while also creating tools and systems that keep data and insights flowing in real-time.

• Analyze and segment player audiences to inform game development, feature prioritization, and live operations strategies.

• Assess player retention drivers, cross-game engagement patterns, and monetization trends (e.g., in-app purchases, ad revenue).

• Design and analyze A/B and multivariate tests on game mechanics, UI features, and content updates.

• Partner with product managers, game developers, and engineers to instrument gameplay events, develop clean measurement plans, and ensure trusted data capture.

• Lead definition and harmonization of key game metrics (DAU, MAU, ARPDAU, LTV, churn, etc.), creating single sources of truth for reporting and dashboarding.

• Build and maintain executive dashboards in Looker, Tableau, or equivalent BI tools, tailored to Yahoo Games leadership.

• Develop automated alerting in Slack or email for major shifts in core game KPIs.

• Identify and articulate strategic opportunities, risks, and growth levers—bringing games-specific context to recommendations.

• Enable self-serve analytics, driving adoption and training on dashboards..

• Proactively address data quality issues, maintain high standards for dataset documentation, and escalate gaps in reporting.

• Serve as the data voice in greenlight reviews, live ops syncs, and post-launch retros—distilling complex insights to unlock business value.

About You

• 5+ years as a business, product, or data scientist—ideally supporting games, gaming platforms, or entertainment tech.

• Expert in data storytelling, with a proven track record of supporting game studios or gaming platforms with clear, actionable insights.

• Highly skilled in SQL and Python for advanced analytics, automation of reporting pipelines, and large-scale data manipulation (GCP/BigQuery/LookML a plus).

• Deep experience designing and analyzing controlled experiments in a gaming context (A/B tests on game features, tutorials, progression systems).

• Hands-on with executive dashboard creation and metric harmonization for gaming KPIs using tools like Looker, Tableau—bonus if you’ve built dashboards for games product teams.

• Strategic thinker with strong business acumen and bias for action, thriving in ambiguous, growth-driven gaming environments.

• Excellent communicator, able to present findings confidently to game executives, production leads, and studio partners.

• Track record of defining and evolving player and game-level metrics; driving consensus and adoption within the Games squad.

• Experience empowering non-analytical stakeholders to self-serve via dashboards, explores, and alerting.

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent professional experience.

The material job duties and responsibilities of this role include those listed above as well as adhering to Yahoo policies; exercising sound judgment; working effectively, safely and inclusively with others; exhibiting trustworthiness and meeting expectations; and safeguarding business operations and brand integrity.

At Yahoo, we offer flexible hybrid work options that our employees love! While most roles don’t require regular office attendance, you may occasionally be asked to attend in-person events or team sessions. You’ll always get notice to make arrangements. Your recruiter will let you know if a specific job requires regular attendance at a Yahoo office or facility. If you have any questions about how this applies to the role, just ask the recruiter!

Yahoo is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to, and will not be discriminated against based on age, race, gender, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran status, disability or any other protected category. Yahoo will consider for employment qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with applicable law. Yahoo is dedicated to providing an accessible environment for all candidates during the application process and for employees during their employment. If you need accessibility assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability, please submit a request via the Accommodation Request Form (www.yahooinc.com/careers/contact-us.html) or call +1.866.772.3182. Requests and calls received for non-disability related issues, such as following up on an application, will not receive a response.

We believe that a diverse and inclusive workplace strengthens Yahoo and deepens our relationships. When you support everyone to be their best selves, they spark discovery, innovation and creativity. Among other efforts, our 11 employee resource groups (ERGs) enhance a culture of belonging with programs, events and fellowship that help educate, support and create a workplace where all feel welcome.

The compensation for this position ranges from $128,250.00 - $266,875.00/yr and will vary depending on factors such as your location, skills and experience.The compensation package may also include incentive compensation opportunities in the form of discretionary annual bonus or commissions. Our comprehensive benefits include healthcare, a great 401k, backup childcare, education stipends and much (much) more.

Currently work for Yahoo? Please apply on our internal career site.