Principal / Staff Data Scientist
Xsolla
Apply to this jobWe are looking for an accomplished Principal Machine Learning Engineer to join our global ML organization. In this role, you will drive innovation across our machine learning ecosystem, architect advanced ML solutions, and mentor junior ML engineers around the world. You will play a key part in shaping our technical direction—leading complex ML initiatives, elevating engineering standards, and guiding teams as they build scalable, production‑ready machine learning systems.
If you are ambitious, energized by solving challenging technical problems, passionate about developing talent, and excited to influence the future of ML/AI in the video game industry, this could be the perfect role for you.
Requirements:
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Advanced Degree in Statistics, machine learning or related areas. Experience in statistics/ML expertise with a track record of leading high-impact data science initiatives at scale of billions of transactions.
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Hands-on experience creating, training and fine-tuning models not just integrating hosted model APIs. You should be able to walk through the data, the objective, what broke, and the before/after evaluation numbers, and why the model did not perform as expected.
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Experience owning models in production: deployment, monitoring, drift detection, retraining — with real latency budgets, not just research notebooks.
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Production experience with classical ML for fraud/anomaly detection, recommendation, or churn/LTV (gradient boosting, deep learning, graph-based models).
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Supervised learning, transfer leaning on machine learning as well as neural networks
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Basic LLM knowledge, especially how to use it and where not to use it.
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MLOps foundations: feature stores, experiment tracking, model registries (MLflow/W&B-class), continuous training pipelines.
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Model serving and inference optimization (vLLM-class serving, quantization).
Modeling Depth
Technology Familiarity
Nice-to-Have:
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Publications, conference talks, or recognized open-source contributions to training/eval tooling .
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Graph-based fraud detection (fraud rings, device/account linkage)..
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Gaming, payments, fraud, advertising domain experience.
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Hands-on, up-to-date experience with modern AI tools (e.g., Claude, Copilot, Cursor) for code generation, review, and accelerating day-to-day engineering work.
Summary
Lead ML initiatives, develop models, and guide ML teams in a remote setting.
Job title
Principal / Staff Data Scientist
Experience level
advanced degree
Industry
software
Location requirements
remote USA, flexible work location allowed
Salary
Not specified
Visa sponsorship
H-1B sponsor history
Management role
No
Required skills
Preferred skills
Specializations
Structured locations inferred from the posting.
United States