Lead Data Scientist

Are you looking to be part of something really special? Have you ever wanted to use your skills to help build a business from the ground floor up?

This is your chance!

ACC is one of the largest municipal animal shelter system in the U.S., serving 16,000+ animals per year across five borough-based shelters. We’re building a data and analytics capability from scratch — and you’ll lead it. The immediate mission is to create the data infrastructure, predictive models, and population simulation tools that help ACC save more animals. The longer-term opportunity: what you build will become a product offered to other large municipal shelter systems nationwide.

You’ll be the founding technical leader of both.

• Unified five-shelter database. Design and build a borough-indexed animal-level data architecture connecting intake, outcome, behavior, medical, foster, and community records across all five shelters — the system of record for every analysis downstream.
• Operational predictive models. Intake forecasting per shelter, surrender risk scoring, length-of-stay prediction with cross-shelter transfer optimization, and foster conversion models.
• Real-time dashboards. Replace static reporting with live, per-shelter dashboards tracking intake, placement, capacity, and community program effectiveness.
• Product-ready architecture. Design everything with multi-tenancy and portability in mind. The database schema, model pipelines, and dashboards you build for ACC will form the core of a SaaS product for other municipal shelter systems.

• 5–10 years of applied data science with hands-on data engineering (pipelines, databases, cloud infrastructure) — not just modeling
• Strong in Python, SQL, and at least one cloud platform (GCP, AWS, or Azure). Experience with time-series forecasting, classification models, and survival analysis.
• You build things that non-technical people can use. Dashboard design, stakeholder communication, and translating model outputs into plain-English decisions matter as much as the math.
• Experience in healthcare, social services, operations analytics, or multi-site organizations is a strong plus. So is experience mentoring junior analysts or graduate students.
• Motivated by impact. You care about building something that demonstrably saves lives and could scale nationally.

We are building this as a project that can lead to a startup. ACC is our alpha customer — the pilot engagement where we develop, test, and refine the platform with a municipal shelter system handling 16,000+ animals per year across five boroughs. Once the product is sufficiently advanced at ACC, we will engage with a small number of other large municipal shelter organizations to validate the model as a scalable business.

Most major U.S. cities operate multi-shelter systems with the same challenges; the market opportunity is real. You’ll be supported day-to-day by a junior data engineer (months 1–4) and a junior data scientist/part-time PhD student (joining month
3) building population dynamics models under your guidance. You’ll report to an ACC board member and ACC leadership. The engagement starts full-time and might taper as the team grows. Total initial commitment: 12 months.