Vice President, Data Science ML Strategy

📋 Description

• • Own the end-to-end vision, roadmap, and delivery of MissionWired’s data science and machine-learning capabilities, translating philanthropic and political fundraising goals into scalable, production-grade solutions that have already powered more than $4.5 billion in donations.
• • Serve as the primary strategic bridge between technical teams (data scientists, ML engineers, product managers) and non-technical stakeholders across fundraising, creative, media, and client leadership, ensuring every model, pipeline, and experiment maps directly to revenue, donor engagement, or mission impact KPIs.
• • Define, scope, and prioritize a portfolio of concurrent data-science initiatives—ranging from real-time donor-propensity models and multi-channel attribution to NLP-driven content optimization and anomaly-detection for fraud prevention—balancing technical feasibility, resource capacity, and expected ROI.
• • Provide hands-on technical leadership when needed: architecting cloud-native ML workflows on AWS/GCP, reviewing Python/R model code, debugging distributed PySpark jobs, and conducting QA on model performance, fairness, and reproducibility before any deployment touches 50M+ supporter records.
• • Mentor and scale a high-performing, multidisciplinary team of 10–20 data scientists, ML engineers, and data product managers; institute career ladders, performance frameworks, and a culture of continuous learning that has made MissionWired a destination employer for mission-driven technologists.
• • Champion MLOps best practices—feature stores, CI/CD for models, automated retraining, and monitoring—so that every experiment can graduate from notebook to production in days, not months, while meeting SOC-2-grade security and privacy standards for sensitive donor data.
• • Collaborate cross-functionally with analytics, engineering, creative, and client strategy teams to embed predictive insights into email, SMS, direct mail, social, and paid-media workflows, driving measurable lifts in conversion, average gift size, and lifetime value.
• • Anticipate future technical debt and capability gaps by evaluating emerging big-data technologies (e.g., Snowflake, dbt, Ray, vector databases) and making build-vs-buy recommendations that keep the stack modern, cost-efficient, and aligned with 24/7 election-cycle demands.
• • Translate complex statistical concepts into clear narratives for board members, nonprofit CEOs, and political campaign managers, securing buy-in and budget for next-generation experimentation such as uplift modeling, causal inference, and reinforcement-learning-based donor journeys.
• • Instill rigorous experimental design and statistical rigor across the organization, ensuring every A/B test, multivariate test, and quasi-experiment meets the highest standards of validity, ethics, and interpretability in a highly regulated fundraising environment.
• • Foster an inclusive, equitable team culture that actively recruits and retains talent from underrepresented backgrounds, reflecting the diverse communities our clients serve and amplifying MissionWired’s commitment to social justice and progressive change.
• • Own the data-science P&L, forecasting cloud-compute and tooling costs, negotiating vendor contracts, and demonstrating clear ROI through dashboards that tie model performance directly to dollars raised and lives impacted.