Senior Vice President, Content Data Science

ViacomCBS (NASDAQ: VIAC; VIACA) is a leading global media and entertainment company that creates premium content and experiences for audiences worldwide. Driven by iconic consumer brands, its portfolio includes CBS, Showtime Networks, Paramount Pictures, Nickelodeon, MTV, Comedy Central, BET, Paramount+, Pluto TV and Simon & Schuster, among others. The company delivers the largest share of the U.S. television audience and boasts one of the industry's most important and extensive libraries of TV and film titles. In addition to offering innovative streaming services and digital video products, ViacomCBS provides powerful capabilities in production, distribution and advertising solutions for partners on five continents.

We are looking for an experienced Data Science Executive to lead a newly-created Content Optimization team where we have the mission to use modern data science to improve decision-making relating to the distribution and development of media content. In this role, you will look across our brands, platforms and 3rd party distribution partnerships to assess the frequent, multi-million dollar decisions on content. Improving these decisions has the potential to build competitive advantage and unlock value in a rapidly evolving media marketplace. In facing this challenge, the company is seeking to use the highly distinctive data assets that it owns across linear TV channels and streaming services such as Paramount Plus and Pluto, to deliver unparalleled insight on consumer and content trends.

 

In this role, you will build an industry leading team of data scientists who will work across our brands and platforms to create predictive models that support highly critical “big-ticket” content distribution and development decisions. This will be achieved in collaboration with our other data science and research groups to evolve the roadmap of data science insights/products at the company.

 

The role reports to the EVP, Strategic Planning and will involve extensive interaction with senior executives across the company. This represents a uniquely exciting opportunity for a data science leader to deliver impact at a leading company in a rapidly-evolving industry.

Key Responsibilities:

• Grow, lead and motivate a high-caliber team of data scientists with the necessary range of skills to address content optimization across the company
• Partner with the Content Optimization business analysis team to frame key modeling questions and understand business implications in order to deliver analytics insights which result in tangible business outcomes
• Communicate the insights from data science models at an executive level, and help senior business executives think through complex decisions based on the available data and insights that your team generates
• Develop, maintain and scale successful data science models, run the product roadmap and project timing, and collaborate with engineering teams as applicable
• Scale data science insights, products and adoption globally across our portfolio of brands, platforms and geographies
• Work with the research organization to acquire and publish pertinent data that supports content decision-making across the company, including supporting conversations with 2nd/3rd party providers of data
• Collaborate with the technology organization to evolve the data architecture to support better integration, and platform tools to support data science

• 15+ years of professional experience including 10 years of experience in data science and related advanced analytics responsibilities
• Previous experience growing, running and motivating a team of high-caliber data scientists for a consumer-facing company with leading-edge tech capabilities, to deliver concrete results and outcomes

• A strong academic data science background including postgraduate qualification in a quantitative subject area
• Familiarity with a range of consumer analytics tasks including customer segmentation, path analysis, demand forecasting, product/content affinity analysis and classification/metadata extraction from unstructured content.
• Ability to draw on a range of quantitative techniques and subject areas, including Bayesian/frequentist statistics, classical and modern deep machine learning, time series methods, experimental design/multi-arm bandits, causal inference/econometric methods, (portfolio) optimization and natural language processing
• Understanding of modern cloud and distributed computing technologies (including cloud SQL data warehouses) and hands-on experience in Python, SQL and preferably R
• Experience running data science in a modern DevOps, MLOps and data engineering environment
• Experience of applying analytics to content development, distribution and viewership in the media industry (streaming experience preferred)
• Experience in scoping and managing the delivery of data science projects through the phases of POC, MVP through to production operations, working closely with engineering/technology teams and using modern agile methodologies and tools
• Highly collaborative working style and track record of mentoring, developing and supporting teams