Senior Data Scientist - Urban Mobility and Location Intelligence 

On-Site (3+ days / week) – SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA (Little Italy) 

About Us  

Motionworks is a leader in population intelligence—providing past, present, and predictive insights on how the total population moves throughout the physical world. We transform billions of GPS traces, POI databases, and behavioral signals into actionable insights for retailers, advertisers, urban planners, and transportation agencies across North America. 

Our Population Intelligence Platform tackles one of the hardest problems in data science: inferring population-level behavior from sparse, noisy, messy location data. We don't have the luxury of clean datasets—we work with terabytes of real-world GPS traces where some data is good, some is not, and the signal often hides in the noise. 

Job Summary  

We're hiring a Senior Data Scientist to lead methodology development for our core population modeling systems. This is not a data engineering role—we have engineers who productionize your work. This is an applied research and modeling role where you'll design, defend, and validate statistical models that turn observed travel behavior from millions of devices into robust population-level insights. At the end of the day, we need results, not just research. Your work will directly shape how we measure foot traffic, predict travel patterns, and distinguish meaningful signals from noise at national and international scale. 

You will be tasked with: 

• Designing and validating Bayesian inference models to extrapolate observed location data to unobserved populations 
• Developing methods to distinguish personal travel from commercial delivery patterns in ambiguous GPS traces 
• Building statistical frameworks for handling varying data quality and penetration rates across geographies 
• Creating defensible models for trip purpose inference, stay-point detection, and behavioral segmentation 
• Writing concise technical documentation to explain methodology to internal stakeholders and clients 
• Prototyping approaches that engineering teams can translate into production pipelines (Python, SQL, or other cloud-native tools) 
• Recommending new data acquisitions and validation techniques to improve model performance 

Required Qualifications and Skills  

• 8-10 years of applied experience working with large-scale location, mobility, or behavioral data (OR Master's/PhD + demonstrated applied work in transportation/retail analytics) 
• Proven experience at scale with messy, real-world datasets—hundreds of millions of records, imperfect data quality, sparse observations 
• Deep statistical foundations: Can derive likelihood functions, explain model assumptions, defend methodological choices with mathematical rigor 
• Bayesian inference expertise: Experience with hierarchical models, prior specification, and uncertainty quantification—critical for extrapolating from sparse observations to population-level insights and handling varying data quality across geographies 
• Strong technical skills: Python (NumPy, pandas, scikit-learn, statsmodels, PyMC or similar) and SQL for complex queries and data exploration in BigQuery/Spark environments 
• Domain intuition: Understanding of how people move through cities—even if you discover patterns empirically, you should recognize when results align with or contradict transportation theory  

Ideal Background 

• Experience at a technology company working on mobility/logistics problems at global scale 
• Familiarity with travel behavior concepts (trip chaining, mode choice, origin-destination modeling) 
• GIS/geospatial analysis skills (PostGIS, H3, spatial joins) 
• Exposure to travel survey data (NHTS, household travel surveys) 

Salary Range  

$200k-$240k  

Location 

San Diego, California (Little Italy) 

Benefits  

• Medical, dental, and vision coverage for you and your dependents 
• First year of employment gives two weeks of PTO, four weeks thereafter  
• 14 holidays and flex holidays  
• 401(k) plan 
• Employee equity 

Applicants must be legally authorized to work in the United States. This position is not eligible for employer-sponsored work visas now or in the future.

Motionworks does not discriminate in employment on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, pregnancy, gender identity, national origin, political affiliation, sexual orientation, marital status, disability, genetic information, age, parental status, military service, or other non-merit factor.