Senior Data Scientist

About Semgrep

Semgrep, the leader in code security for builders, empowers invention without friction. Teams catch, flag, and fix real issues before they ship, powered by security that learns as they build. Semgrep secures code as it’s written and provides guardrails that pave the road for developers to move fast and stay secure. Built for builders and trusted by security, Semgrep lives where developers work, delivering fixes without breaking flow, and giving security teams visibility, control, and confidence. Semgrep gets smarter as you build, with AI that learns your context to cut false positives and prioritize reachable vulnerabilities, validated by 95% of security reviewers across 6M+ findings. Semgrep makes zero false positives a reality with AppSec teams triaging 80% fewer false positives across Code and Supply Chain, dramatically shrinking the backlog.

Founded in San Francisco and backed by Menlo Ventures, Felicis Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures, and Sequoia Capital, Semgrep is recognized by Gartner in Application Security Testing and is trusted by leading organizations, including Vanta, Lyft, and Dropbox. Learn more at semgrep.dev.

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, initially contributing to a quarter-long project while growing your technical skill set and domain knowledge to start taking on more responsibility and influencing data and business decisions within the company.

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

• Contribute to specific data science projects and initiatives 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 build a dashboard to track Board level metrics for the Engineering team, the second you might apply multivariate regression to identify important product features, the third you might apply active-learning techniques to guide data collection and labeling

• 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 across the full company stack: Board-level, leadership team, and individual team leads

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

• Aptitude delivering technical projects via rapid iterative development

• Experience working on a small team in a fast-paced environment and are willing to experiment with different approaches before settling on the best and most elegant solution given time constraints

• 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 to show how the product is improving

• Work together with Product leadership to identify the correct north-star metrics to measure Product usage and what features to build next

• Partner with the rule-writing team to identify the most impactful rules and languages to focus on in real-time

• Build out cleaned/medallion Silver and Gold tables in our Data Lakehouse for internal engineering and product teams to self-serve their analytics needs

• Build an S3 → Snowflake data pipeline and processing engine to improve Repo contributor count metrics for Billing team

• 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

• 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

• Build and maintain foundational data MCPs to empower the internal analytics of the business

• Iterate and improve on our semantic data layer feeding into the MCPs maintained by the team

Location expectations:

• Our expectation is that this role will be hybrid - requiring 3 days a week in our San Francisco office.

Compensation

The estimated starting annual salary range for this position is $163,000 - $204,000 USD. The actual base salary will be determined based on a number of factors, which may include job-related skills, relevant experience, qualifications, location, internal equity, and market data. In addition to base salary, total compensation may include equity, variable compensation, and benefits. We view equity as a meaningful part of our compensation philosophy and a way for employees to share in the long-term value they help create.
Compensation ranges are reviewed regularly and may be adjusted as the role, individual performance, or market conditions evolve.

What we offer (FTE only)

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 invest in our employees’ well-being and long-term success through a competitive, market-aligned benefits program that meets or exceeds local market standards across all of the regions in which we hire. Benefits offerings vary by location to reflect local requirements and norms. For more detailed, location-specific information, please visit Semgrep Benefits.

Who we are

We bring together people from a wide range of backgrounds and disciplines—from physics and philosophy to formal methods research and full-fledged corporations. We’re new parents and new grads, 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 Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin.