TC over $500k possible in data science?
Feb 7, 2020
163 Comments
I have a director level position at a < 500 person company. I manage a small team of data scientists, analysts, and engineers. I’m trying to plan out my next 18 months to make myself as marketable as possible. I am looking at Head of Data roles at companies like Affirm, Twitch, DoorDash, Twitter, etc.
Can you even get TC over $500k in Data Science, or will I have to switch back to eng/PM to get that?
What skills do I need to have to get a job with $500k+ TC in data science?
TC: $330k
comments
In my experience, most use cases are opportunities where the business value is small enough that it's not worth it to do much more than AutoML or even a simple logistic regression and the data is small enough that you don't need to worry about scaling past a single, large instance.
Sure, there are lots of cases where the value is there (esp at FB, GOOG, AMZN and similar but smaller sized web-scale companies that are data-centric), but they are fewer and further between and it makes sense for those guys to hire legions of $800K ML resources.
The secret sauce in most cases (again, in my humble experience) is deeply understanding the business use-case* so that you can structure the right training set and formulate the appropriate ML model. Oh, production-izing often isn't trivial but 3rd party tools / services are getting better all the time.
*I can't emphasize enough how often I've seen this is done wrong, leading to "accurate" but useless ML models
A friend is a director of data science at a ride sharing company and makes $600k+
Or go townhouse/condo = starter house