Sr. Data Scientist

About Semgrep

Semgrep is on a mission to make it expensive to exploit software. As the team behind the most popular SAST, we built the Semgrep AppSec Platform to deliver industry-leading code, dependency, and secrets scanning to enable organizations to ship secure code quickly without slowing down development.

With fast, customizable code analysis across large codebases, Semgrep helps teams catch vulnerabilities early and fix them faster. Leading companies like Snowflake, Plaid, Figma, Lyft, and Dropbox rely on Semgrep to secure their software.

Semgrep is funded by top investors, including Felicis Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Menlo Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, and Sequoia Capital.

About the role

You will be an early member of Semgrep’s data team. Your mission will be to define how an entire company uses data, always striving to best improve our users’ security. You will work on a diverse set of problems, touching every aspect of the startup: extracting product insights from usage metrics, determining business strategy from market data, crafting production data pipelines, and defining where to direct our security research. This is a growth role: while you will start as an individual contributor, you will help grow this team, either by stepping into a management role yourself, or helping us recruit the awesome data-science lead you’ve always wanted.

Along the way, you will work with a dedicated group of full-stack, backend, and infrastructure engineers, as well as security researchers and program-analysis developers. You will learn what it means to have “secure-by-default” code. You will meet and collaborate with security-industry scions. And, as a member of our team, you’ll be a part of the decisions that make a high-growth startup successful. Your work will be critical to our mission. Every feature you build will have a measurable impact on our users’ lives. We’re excited to see what you do.

What you'll do

• Lead data science at Semgrep; discovering each department’s most pressing data problems, and proactively identifying the most critical areas to focus your efforts


• Bring your wide knowledge of data-science approaches to each problem you solve: the first day you might apply multivariate regression to identify important product features, the second you might apply active-learning techniques to guide data collection and labeling, and the third you might work on an AI algorithm to improve security quality for our users


• Iteratively tackle problems as a series of experiments, proving the value of your work with proof-of-concept to ever more refined results


• Convince your peers of your conclusions with clear data visualizations and well-reasoned explanation


• Help grow your team through the recruitment and hiring of top data talent

You are ideal for this role if you have

• 4+ years of experience in data and strategy fields


• Knowledge of data-science approaches; this may include machine-learning algorithms, optimization methods or symbolic artificial-intelligence, but should also include statistical methods and “good-enough” heuristics — and the taste to know when to use each


• Experience clearly visualizing information and experimental results


• Sufficient familiarity with production data-processing pipelines to construct them working together with generalist infrastructure engineers; tools we use include S3, FiveTran, DBT, Snowflake, Metabase, Retool, Tableau, Sagemaker/JupyterNotebook (Python)


• Aptitude delivering technical projects via rapid iterative development


• Excellent, proactive communication, both verbal and written

Some example projects that you might work on include

• Build a client-facing dashboard showing scan time metrics over time


• Build a statistical model that analyzes pseudonymous usage data to recommend the next features built into the Semgrep open-source tool


• Consume infrastructure observation metrics to identify and address potential Semgrep.dev registry outages before they occur


• Recruit varied and disjoint data into a “North Star” metric for the performance of the Semgrep open-source tool over time


• Build out cleaned/medallion Silver and Gold tables for internal engineering teams to


• Craft a security-rule-recommendation decision tree, using codebase features like languages, frameworks, code sentiment, and commit-message sentiment, to deliver targeted, high-value static-analysis rules to users

Compensation/Location

Preference for 2-3 days per week in one of our office locations (SF/NY/Boston/Denver)

Salary Range: $133,000 - $181,500

Our compensation package includes equity and benefits in addition to salary.

Please note that the range listed is for someone based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

What we offer

Our goal is to competitively and fairly compensate every Semgrep employee with a system that equally rewards those who are vocal and those who are less comfortable making demands during the final steps of the hiring process. To that end, we generate internal compensation bands that are used when discussing and negotiating salaries. We update these based on market data to make sure they’re above the average for comparable roles.

We also invest in our employees’ well-being and long term success with comprehensive health plans, generous vacation time, 401k, learning stipends, and more. Our benefits are for everyone, so that you’re taken care of, and we work with individuals to make sure they have what they need, whether that’s quiet work space, adjusted hours, or something else.

Who we are

We have people from France and the Philippines, physics and philosophy, formal methods research and full fledged corporations. We’re new parents and new grads, aspiring authors and aspiring Americans, dog lovers and dogfooders. We get together often to bike, bake, and meet up in parks. In our interactions, we believe respect and honesty go hand in hand, and prioritize both.

Semgrep is an equal-opportunity employer seeking a diverse range of backgrounds. We value who you are — including your cultural heritage, your socioeconomic status, your age, your race, your gender, your sexual orientation, your disabilities. We value what’s vitally important to you — your family, your religion, your politics. We value what you love in this world — your music, your weekend pursuits. We believe in welcoming varied professional backgrounds, educations, and interests. If you’re exceptional in your role, believe in Semgrep’s mission, and treat Semgrep’s values as your own, you belong here.

Please Note: For US-based roles open to remote work, we are currently able to hire employees in the following states only: Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and Washington.