Senior Principal Data Scientist

Smartsheet is looking for a Sr. Principal Data Scientist to set the technical direction for the ML models and AI sub-agents that drive growth, monetization, efficiency, and retention across the customer lifecycle. You’ll architect the systems, define the modeling and evaluation standards, and shape the roadmap for how Smartsheet uses applied ML and agentic AI to serve millions of customers. The data is unusually rich: petabyte-scale execution data spanning two decades of how real work gets done. You are a recognized technical leader who moves fluidly between architecture, prototype, and production; raises the bar for the data scientists around you; and partners with senior product and engineering leaders to make decisions that compound across the org. You will work primarily with Product and Engineering and will be a part of Smartsheet’s Business Intelligence team.

This full-time position reports to the Director of Data Science and is based in Smartsheet’s Bengaluru, India office.

You Will:

• Set the technical direction for how Smartsheet uses applied ML and agentic AI across the customer lifecycle — what gets built, what doesn’t, and what good looks like
• Architect the systems behind the sub-agents: how they ground themselves in evidence, how risk and confidence are calibrated, how decisions are evaluated, and how all of it stays safe and trustworthy at scale
• Define the modeling, evaluation, and experimentation standards the team follows — from offline metrics to online rollout to production monitoring
• Personally ship the highest-leverage models and sub-agents — the ones that need a senior IC to frame the problem, push through ambiguity, and de-risk the approach
• Drive technical decisions on the data foundations and knowledge layer sub-agents reason over, with strong stewardship of privacy, aggregation, and customer trust
• Partner with senior Product, Engineering, and Applied AI leaders to shape strategy, roadmap, and investment
• Raise the bar for the data science team — mentor staff and principal data scientists, review designs, set hiring standards, and grow the org’s modeling rigor

You Have:

• Bachelor’s degree and 12+ years of experience (or 14+ years of experience); advanced degree in a quantitative field (Statistics, CS, ML, Economics, Operations Research, or similar) strongly preferred
• Track record of setting technical direction for applied ML and AI work that ships and matters — major initiatives, complex systems, or new modeling paradigms taken from idea to production impact
• Deep applied ML expertise across both traditional ML and deep learning: gradient boosting, regularized linear models, transformer-based sequence models, foundation model embeddings, causal ML, contextual bandits, and offline RL
• Architect-level grasp of agentic AI systems: tool use, retrieval, multi-step reasoning, evaluation, guardrails, and the patterns for keeping all of it reliable in production
• Strong grasp of causal inference for intervention design and lifecycle modeling: uplift modeling, difference-in-differences, propensity scoring, and synthetic control
• Solid foundation in statistics and experimental design at scale: hypothesis testing, power analysis, multiple comparisons, sequential testing, and quasi-experimental methods
• Experience operating ML in production at scale — feature engineering and pipelines, model monitoring, drift detection, retraining cadence, and the trade-offs between batch and real-time serving
• Proficient in SQL and Python; comfort with ML/LLM tooling at scale (Spark, Databricks, Snowflake, or equivalents), ML frameworks (PyTorch, scikit-learn, XGBoost/LightGBM), and visualization tools (Tableau or similar)
• Experience leading lifecycle modeling work — churn, expansion, adoption, plan health, lead/account scoring — and business fluency in the SaaS metrics that drive it (NRR, GRR, ARR, and cohort economics)
• A pragmatic production bar: latency, cost, monitoring, drift, hallucination, and what happens when the model or sub-agent is wrong
• Demonstrated ability to influence senior product and engineering leaders and to mentor staff and principal data scientists — your track record shows people and decisions, not just models, getting better
• Comfort operating in deep ambiguity — defining the problem, choosing the approach, and aligning the team when no playbook exists