Lead Data Scientist

About the Position

Bitdefender is a cybersecurity leader delivering best-in-class threat prevention, detection, and response solutions worldwide. We are looking for a Lead Data Scientist to guide a team building production-ready machine learning and AI systems that support data-driven decision-making across the company.

This is a hands-on leadership role for someone who enjoys combining technical depth, product thinking, and people development. You will work closely with Data Analysis, Data Engineering, Data Warehousing, product teams, and business stakeholders to turn complex business needs into reliable, scalable, and measurable data science solutions.

Responsibilities

• Lead the Data Science team in building reliable ML and AI solutions, from problem framing and data exploration to deployment, monitoring, and continuous improvement.
• Translate business needs into clear technical plans, measurable success criteria, and practical solutions with visible business impact.
• Work closely with Data Analysis, Data Engineering, Data Warehousing, product, and business stakeholders to design scalable data and model workflows.
• Set technical standards for clean code, reproducible experiments, model tracking, documentation, observability, and production readiness.
• Mentor data scientists, support their growth, and help the team make strong technical and product decisions.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience in applied ML/AI, including hands-on work with production-oriented solutions.
• Strong Python and SQL skills, with experience working with complex real-world data and building maintainable workflows.
• Experience with the ML lifecycle, including feature engineering, model training, evaluation, deployment, monitoring, and iteration.
• Practical exposure to LLM-based applications, such as RAG, embeddings, prompt engineering, vector search, orchestration, or evaluation.
• Strong communication and leadership skills, with the ability to explain technical trade-offs and guide both people and projects.

Nice to Have

• Master’s degree or PhD in Computer Science, Mathematics, Statistics, Data Science, Machine Learning, or a related field.
• Experience with tools such as GCP, Airflow, Docker, Kubernetes, MLflow, Langfuse, FastAPI, BentoML, LlamaIndex, LangChain, Haystack, Milvus, or similar.
• Familiarity with MLOps, model governance, observability, data quality monitoring, or reusable ML/AI platform components.

We Offer

• Opportunity to work with a leading cybersecurity company.
• Be part of a team that protects millions of environments worldwide.
• Competitive salary and benefits package.

About the Company

Bitdefender is a cybersecurity leader delivering best-in-class threat prevention, detection, and response solutions worldwide. With deep investments in research and development, Bitdefender Labs discovers hundreds of new threats each minute and validates billions of threat queries daily. The company has pioneered breakthrough innovations in antimalware, IoT security, behavioral analytics, and artificial intelligence and its technology is licensed by more than 180 of the world’s most recognized technology brands. Founded in 2001, Bitdefender has customers in 170+ countries with offices around the world. For more information, visit Bitdefender.