Director - Data Science, Customer Experience

About the role

What are we building?
Hard Rock Digital is a fiercely focused team working to become the best online sportsbook, casino, and social gaming company in the world. We're building a deeply curious team with a passion for learning, operating, and building new products and technologies for millions of consumers. We're customer-obsessed — we care about each customer interaction, experience, behavior, and insight, and strive to ensure we're always acting authentically.

Rooted in the kindred spirits of Hard Rock and the Seminole Tribe of Florida, Hard Rock Digital taps a brand known the world over as the leader in gaming, entertainment, and hospitality. We're taking that foundation of success and bringing it to the digital space - ready to join us?

What's the position?

We're looking for a Director, Data Science, Customer Experience to lead the pillar that decides how we engage every Hard Rock Bet customer after they sign up. At HRD, customer experience is driven by CRM: the messages, offers, and journeys a player receives across onboarding, engagement, cross-sell, retention, and reactivation.

You'll own the science behind that experience, propensity and uplift models, next-best-action and offer optimization, send-time and channel decisioning, and the experimentation framework that proves what works. You'll lead a team of data scientists and applied AI engineers, and partner with CRM, VIP, Marketing, and Data Engineering to move HRD from rules-based campaigns to model-driven, increasingly automated decisioning. Success is measured in retention, engagement, cross-sell, and incremental revenue, delivered within responsible gaming commitments and state regulations.

What will you do?

• Own the Customer Experience science roadmap and KPIs end to end: strategy, modeling, delivery, and production health for all CRM decisioning models at HRD

• Lead, grow, and develop a team of data scientists and applied AI engineers, setting scientific standards and a culture of shipping measurable outcomes

• Partner with CRM and VIP to power next-best-action, offer and bonus targeting, send-time and channel optimization, and lifecycle journeys

• Drive the automation of CRM operations with AI agents and LLM workflows, in partnership with Applied AI Engineering

• Partner with Marketing and Finance to measure the incremental impact of CRM and bonus spend and reconcile it to the P&L

• Build responsible gaming and compliance guardrails into every model: exclusion logic, state-specific rules, and safe targeting constraints

• Own model monitoring, drift detection, and retraining for the pillar, in partnership with AI Ops & Observability

• Report pillar KPIs monthly to leadership and participate in annual talent and headcount planning

Requirements

What are we looking for?

• 8+ years in data science or machine learning, with 3+ years leading data scientists or ML engineers and shipping production models

• Deep, hands-on expertise in CRM and lifecycle science: propensity, churn, uplift, next-best-action, offer and bonus optimization, send-time and channel optimization

• Strong experimentation and causal inference foundations: holdout design, power analysis, variance reduction, and incrementality measurement

• Experience applying LLMs and AI agents to marketing operations, from campaign generation and audience building to automated QA and journey orchestration

• Familiarity with real-time ML in production: feature pipelines, low-latency scoring, model monitoring and retraining, preferably on AWS

• Proven ability to build and scale a team: hiring, coaching, performance management, and succession planning

• Ability to turn ambiguous CRM and marketing problems into a prioritized science roadmap and communicate trade-offs to executives

• Master's or PhD in a quantitative field, or equivalent experience

Bonus points if you have:

• Experience in online gaming, sports betting, fintech, or another high-frequency consumer business

• Experience with recommendation and personalization systems that extend CRM decisioning into the product

• Familiarity with our stack or equivalents: Braze, Amplitude, Segment, Snowflake, dbt, Airflow, AWS SageMaker, Bedrock

• Experience with multi-objective optimization that balances revenue, engagement, and customer wellbeing

What's in it for you?

• Competitive pay and benefits

• Flexible vacation allowance

• Startup culture backed by a secure, global brand

Roster of Uniques

We care deeply about every interaction our customers have with us and trust and empower our staff to own and drive their experience. We foster a diverse and inclusive work environment where, regardless of background or beliefs, you feel able to be authentic and bring all your talent into play. We are an equal opportunities employer.