Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This role sits at the intersection of product analytics and platform SaaS, focused on an API and B2B surface area where usage, reliability, and cost tradeoffs directly influence adoption. Within the SaaS ecosystem, platform teams are increasingly the growth engine, and the work described here centers on turning developer behavior and enterprise outcomes into measurable levers for roadmap decisions.
For a SaaS data science career, the standout value is end to end exposure to how metrics become operating systems. Defining north star metrics across activation, retention, and growth, pairing them with latency and cost guardrails, and running controlled rollouts are durable skills across subscription and usage based models. The emphasis on dashboards and self serve tooling also builds fluency in scaling decision making beyond a single analytics function.
The role is best suited to someone who prefers embedded, cross functional work over isolated modeling, and who enjoys ambiguity where the “right” metric definition is part of the problem. It should appeal to data scientists who want their analysis to influence product and engineering tradeoffs, particularly in developer facing or enterprise SaaS contexts where experimentation rigor and operational constraints matter.
The section above is editorial commentary from The SaaS Jobs, provided to help SaaS professionals understand the role in a broader industry context.
Job Description
About the Team
OpenAI’s Platform team powers how millions of developers and enterprises build with our models. We provide APIs and agentic solutions used by global startups and fortune 500s. We work closely with product, engineering, design, and go-to-market to build a world-class platform that pushes the frontier of AI capabilities.
About the Role
As a Data Scientist on the Platform team, you will drive a data-driven culture for OpenAI’s API and B2B solutions. You’ll define the metrics that matter for developer success and enterprise value, measure the impact of new models and features, and partner with PMs and engineers to improve model quality, reliability, latency, and cost. Your work will shape how thousands of products adopt agentic AI.
This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.
In this role, you will
Embed with the Platform product team as a trusted partner, uncovering ways to improve developer experience, reliability, and usage growth
Define north-star metrics across the developer funnel (activation, retention, growth), as well as latency/cost guardrails for new features and models
Design and interpret A/B tests and controlled rollouts (e.g., new model versions, pricing/limits, new API features, new B2B products)
Build source-of-truth dashboards and self-serve data tools for product, engineering, and go-to-market teams
Translate product learnings into actionable feedback for Research (e.g., failure modes, eval gaps, model response quality)
You might thrive in this role if you have
5+ years in a quantitative role in ambiguous, high-growth environments (platforms, APIs, or B2B products a plus)
Depth in SQL and Python, with a track record proposing, designing, and running rigorous experiments
Experience defining and operationalizing metrics from scratch (including reliability/latency/cost and safety)
Strong cross-functional communication with PMs, engineers, and executives
Strategic instincts beyond p-values—clear thinking about tradeoffs and business impact
You could be an especially great fit if you have
Background in developer platforms, observability, or usage-based pricing/quotas
Experience connecting offline evals to online product impact
Prior work in NLP/LLMs or agentic systems, or in enterprise analytics for B2B products
About OpenAI
OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity.
We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.
For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.
Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.
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We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.
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At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.
