Senior data scientist

Zonos is the AI operating system for cross-border trade, powering everything from checkout to customs clearance for more than 50,000 ecommerce merchants and 70+ postal operators across 200+ countries. We help businesses grow globally by removing the complexity of international commerce—calculating, collecting, and guaranteeing duties, taxes, and fees at checkout so shoppers see the true total cost upfront, eliminating surprise charges at delivery and the burden of managing country-specific tax requirements.

Beyond ecommerce, Zonos supports carriers, postal operators, marketplaces, and customs agencies with AI-driven tools that infer and validate key customs data, including HS codes, country of origin, and customs value, alongside licensed customs brokerage services that ensure goods move compliantly and efficiently across borders.

Overview

Behind almost every part of that is a data problem. Inferring an HS code from a messy product title, estimating customs value, deciding when an answer is confident enough to guarantee, spotting the shipments that need a human, and pricing risk across 200+ countries all have real financial and regulatory consequences. We're hiring a data scientist who solves problems and ships the solution. Sometimes that's a fine-tuned LLM. Sometimes it's a Bayesian model, a well-designed experiment, an optimization, a simulation, or a 30-line rule that beats everything else. We want someone with the whole toolbelt and the judgment to pick the right tool. Cleverness for its own sake doesn't interest us. You'll report directly to our Chief Data Scientist and work side by side with engineering, taking problems from "fuzzy and important" to something running in production that customers rely on.

How we work

Zonos doesn't have product managers. At the senior level, you talk to customers and internal teams directly, understand the problem, decide what's worth solving and how, and ship it. Part of the job is judgment: pushing back, proposing a simpler approach, or saying the data doesn't support the decision. Disagreements get resolved quickly and in writing, with clear owners.

Life in St. George UT

This role is on-site at our headquarters in St. George, Utah, where our team enjoys Southern Utah's 300 days of sunshine each year. Snow Canyon State Park is minutes away, Zion National Park is about an hour's drive, and Las Vegas is about two. Relocation assistance is available for candidates moving here.

What you'll do

• Own data problems at the heart of the product, such as classification, valuation, risk, and compliance.
• Choose the approach, whether that's statistical modeling, classical ML, deep learning and LLMs, optimization, or a simple rule.
• Work with messy, multilingual product and shipment data.
• Figure out what it actually says before modeling anything.
• Quantify uncertainty and make it useful.
• Decide when we're confident enough to act, when to route work to a human, and what each error costs.
• Design the evaluations, experiments, and analyses that tell us whether something actually worked, and hold the line when it didn't.
• Write production-quality Python and SQL, then ship, monitor, and iterate on what you build.
• Join the on-call rotation and debug in production, including the subtle failures that only show up on real traffic.
• Bring rigor to product and business decisions beyond your own projects.

You might be a great fit if you...

• Reach for the right tool, not the newest one. You can explain why you chose a GLM over a transformer, or a heuristic over both, and tell us how it played out.
• Own the full loop. You've framed a problem, built the solution, shipped it, and stayed with it after launch.
• Can point to impact. You've shipped work that moved a real metric, and you can tell us which one and how you measured it.
• Write code engineers are happy to merge. You explore in notebooks, and you ship clean, tested code.
• Lead with product judgment. You ask "should we solve this?" before "how do we solve this?"
• Want to live and work in sunny St. George, Utah, with a real work-life balance.

You also bring:

• 5+ years of hands-on data science work with a Bachelor's degree, or 3+ years with a Master's or PhD, including things you built that ran in production.
• Real depth in statistics: inference, experimental design, and uncertainty. You understand what the numbers mean, not just how to produce them.
• Practical experience with ML and LLMs/NLP, including fine-tuning, embeddings, evaluation, and text classification at scale.
• Strong Python and SQL.
• Nice to have: optimization or operations research, causal inference, forecasting, Bayesian methods, serving models on GPUs, and experience with trade, customs, logistics, ecommerce, or payments data.

What we offer:

• Compensation: $200,000–$275,000 annual base salary, depending on experience and demonstrated impact. If your compensation expectations fall outside this range, we'd still love to hear from you. We're focused on finding the right person and are willing to be flexible for exceptional talent.
• Relocation assistance is available for candidates relocating to St. George, Utah.
• Medical, Dental, Vision, & Life - we pay 100% of the employee premium!
• Paid parental leave and other life event leave
• 401k retirement plan with generous company match
• 4 weeks of vacation, plus sick and other paid time off. Take some time to relax!
• Employee Assistance Program
• 1 month paid time off at 5 year anniversary
• Office stocked with snacks and drinks
• Weekly company lunch

Life at Zonos

Welcome to Southern Utah where the sun is shining 255 days out of the year, palm trees are swaying in the breeze, and adventure and exploration await! Neighboring the stunning Zion National Park, Southern Utah is known for its outdoor recreation. Explore endless options for biking and hiking trails all over town, enjoy watersports, boating, and fishing at Sand Hollow State Park, and when you need to get away, we are only a short hour and a half drive to the entertainment and fun of Las Vegas.

As a Zonut you’ll be able to take in the gorgeous view of St. George from Tech Ridge, a rapidly growing epicenter for tech, retail, and dining here in Southern Utah. As an organization, we are always striving to be a great company, not just a big company. We are constantly cultivating an environment of collaboration and teamwork, where our API’s and core values are the living, breathing heartbeat of everything we do. Here at Zonos we are committed to cultivating a team of ambitious and innovative people who are hungry and willing to stretch and grow. International trade is complicated and working at a growing cloud technology company is hard, but we are here to support your learning and development. For these reasons, if you are uncertain about applying, we encourage you to do so even if your experience doesn't exactly match the job description. We welcome diverse perspectives from people who think outside the box and aren't afraid to challenge assumptions. Come join us!