[Remote] Data Scientist (ML / NLP / LLMs)

About this role

Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Sown To Grow (STG) is a K12 education technology platform that empowers schools to improve student social, emotional, and academic health. They are seeking a Data Scientist who will work on building and refining machine learning models to support educators in understanding and assisting students, utilizing both classical and modern approaches.

Responsibilities

Build and refine NLP/ML models over large volumes of unstructured student and educator text, using both classical approaches (feature engineering, classification, CNNs, ensemble methods) and modern LLM-based techniques where they're the right toolPartner with data science, product, and engineering to identify, define, and test opportunities to improve the product through ML/NLP - from turning existing models into user-facing features to prototyping entirely new capabilitiesExtend our models beyond 'proof of concept' scope: new reflection prompts, younger students etc, widening accessibility while protecting accuracyDesign and apply LLMs responsibly for generative and assistive features - for example, contextualized teacher-response suggestions, and resource recommendations - with careful attention to prompting, retrieval, grounding, evaluation, and guardrailsBuild validation, monitoring, and retraining pipelines in partnership with the ML engineering team - including data-drift detection - so models keep performing as code and data changeUndertake preprocessing of structured and unstructured data, and build reliable, reproducible feature and evaluation workflows

Skills

Bachelor's or higher degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Machine Learning, Math, Statistics, or a related field2+ years of experience as a Data Scientist, ML Engineer, or Data Engineer, solving real-world problems with machine learningStrong proficiency in Python and the ML stack (pandas, numpy, scikit-learn; PyTorch or TensorFlow; Spark a plus)Experience building and deploying ML solutions that involve natural language processing of text dataWorking knowledge of core ML techniques such as classification, clustering, prediction, recommender systems, and anomaly detectionWorking knowledge of the complete machine learning lifecycle - data, training, validation, deployment, monitoring, and retrainingSolid understanding of how modern LLMs work under the hood - transformer architecture, training and fine-tuning, tokenization, embeddings. We care more about curiosity than credentials here: you enjoy digging into why a model behaves the way it does, not just what it returns. Hands-on with at least one of prompting/evaluation, fine-tuning, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), or agentic/tool-use patterns, with a thoughtful view of when LLMs are and aren't the right approachExperience writing and maintaining high-quality production code, and comfort with Git-based workflowsStrong interest in working in education technology in an impact-driven, mission-first roleExperience productionizing ML for real-time, low-latency inference (e.g., AWS SageMaker or comparable), including containerization and CI/CDExperience building data-drift detection, model monitoring, and automated retraining systems in partnership with ML engineering teamsExperience building, training, or fine-tuning language models from the ground up - e.g., implementing transformer components, training or adapting models on domain-specific data, or working with open-weight models beyond off-the-shelf APIs. This is a longer-term direction for us, and we value candidates who can grow into itExperience with responsible / trustworthy AI: fairness and bias evaluation, privacy-conscious handling of sensitive data, and building guardrails for user-facing generative featuresExperience designing human-in-the-loop evaluation and running online experiments (A/B testing, feature flagging)Familiarity with the practical, ethical, and legal considerations of working with student data

Benefits

Comprehensive health and wellness benefits for you and your familyFlexible work arrangements and a genuine commitment to work-life balanceReal pathways for growth - as the platform and the data team expand, so does the scope of this roleA collaborative, mission-driven community where every voice is heardCompetitive compensation with performance-based incentives and meaningful equity

Company Overview

Sown To Grow is a student goal-setting and reflection platform that fosters growth mindset and student agency. It was founded in 2015, and is headquartered in Oakland, California, USA, with a workforce of 11-50 employees. Its website is https://www.sowntogrow.com/.

Company H1B Sponsorship

Sown To Grow has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships, with 1 in 2025, 2 in 2024, 1 in 2021. Please note that this does not guarantee sponsorship for this specific role.