About the role
<h2>The Role</h2> <p>The <strong>Senior Data Scientist </strong>will lead the maturation of Securly's content classification system — building the ML infrastructure that determines, at scale, whether web content is appropriate for K-12 students, and establishing the rigorous evaluation framework that product and leadership teams depend on.</p> <p>This is applied ML with direct student safety impact — not research. You will lead a significant uplift of Securly's classification models: refactoring binary models to proper multiclass classification, building labeled evaluation datasets, and producing standardized model cards with per-category precision, recall, F1, and confusion matrix analysis.</p> <p>At L5, you are the technical leader of the data science function for content safety. You will define the evaluation methodology the team follows, set the standard for what a model card must contain before a model ships, mentor the team on applied ML rigor, and serve as the interface between data science and engineering on production integration constraints.</p> <div class="meta-item">Level: <strong>L5</strong></div> <div class="meta-item">Experience: <strong>8–15 Years</strong></div> <div class="meta-item">Location: <strong>Pune, India</strong></div> <div class="meta-item">Work Type: <strong>Hybrid (2 days onsite)</strong></div> <div class="meta-item">Reports To: <strong>Engineering Manager, Data Platform</strong></div> <h2>What It Means to Be L5 at Securly</h2> <p>L5 at Securly is a Staff Engineer. You are the technical owner, not just an implementer.</p> <ul> <li>Drive technical direction for your initiative end-to-end: from architecture to production, with minimal oversight from your engineering manager.</li> <li>Identify and resolve ambiguity in requirements, system boundaries, and design tradeoffs without waiting for a fully-formed spec.</li> <li>Mentor L3/L4 engineers on the team: code reviews, design feedback, pairing, and raising the bar for what production-quality work looks like.</li> <li>Partner with your L6 technical lead and the Distinguished Engineer on architectural decisions, surfacing tradeoffs clearly rather than deferring them upward.</li> <li>Contribute to cross-team engineering standards: you are expected to influence practices beyond your immediate squad.</li> <li>Translate technical context into clear written artifacts that non-engineers (PM, Support, Leadership) can act on.</li> <li>Participate in on-call rotation and own the full incident lifecycle for your system: detection, diagnosis, resolution, and retrospective.</li> </ul> <h2>What You'll Do</h2> <ul>