Data Scientist, People Analytics

At Motive, our People Analytics team sits at the intersection of data science and talent strategy, transforming how we understand and enhance organizational performance. As a Data Scientist on our rapidly growing team, you'll leverage advanced analytics to tackle our most pressing talent challenges and drive measurable business impact.

Role Description

You'll pioneer the application of data science to human capital, building sophisticated models and research that decode organizational behavior and shape Motive's talent strategy. Your work will span critical areas including:

• Predicting and enhancing talent acquisition, development, and retention
• Quantifying and elevating employee experience
• Optimizing team performance
• Maximizing productivity
• Rethinking how we measure talent

Human capital problems require particular attention to sample size impacts, covariance, selection bias, modeling choices, and other issues that can be the difference between highly meaningful & impactful results, and noise. In this role, you will leverage structured problem solving approaches and data science skills to identify and deliver high impact solutions, as well as develop unique data science skills and human-capital expertise.

The Ideal Candidate is:

• Passionate about human capital: You are excited by the value we can add to our company and our employees, and are inspired to help make a large positive impact
• Innovative. You continually research and evaluate emerging technologies. You stay current on published state-of-the-art methods, technologies, and applications and seek out opportunities to apply them.
• Creative. You thrive on bringing definition to big, undefined problems. You love asking questions and pushing hard to find answers. You’re not afraid to share a new idea.
• Technical. You’re comfortable with open-source languages and are passionate about developing further. You have hands-on experience developing data science solutions using open-source tools and cloud computing platforms.
• Statistically-minded. You’ve built models, validated them, and backtested them. You know how to interpret a confusion matrix or a ROC curve. You have experience with network analysis, clustering, classification, time series, and sentiment analysis.

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Data Science, Statistics, Economics, or related quantitative field
• Background in organizational psychology or behavioral economics
• 3+ years of experience applying advanced analytics in people analytics, HR, or workforce planning
• Expert proficiency in Python or R, and SQL
• Proven track record of building and deploying machine learning models
• Experience with statistical analysis, experimental design, and causal inference
• Strong project management skills with demonstrated ability to lead complex analytical initiatives
• Excellent communication skills - ability to translate complex analyses into actionable insights for diverse stakeholders

Preferred Qualifications:

• Master’s or PhD in a quantitative field or equivalent practical experience
• Experience with Organizational Network Analysis
• Experience in visualization tools (e.g., Tableau, PowerBI)
• Experience with natural language processing and unstructured data analysis
• Track record of publishing or presenting analytical work
• Familiarity with HR systems and people data structures