What Is a Senior Data Scientist? How to Become One, Salary, Skills.

Senior data scientists use data to shape high-impact business recommendations and oversee junior data scientists. Here’s what to know about a senior data scientist’s needed skills, salary and how to become one.

What Is a Senior Data Scientist?

Senior data scientists discover insights through data analysis to support business development and enterprise strategies. They have similar responsibilities to junior data scientists, though are more involved in team management as well as hold greater authority in long-term data-driven decisions and projects.

What Do Senior Data Scientists Do?

Senior data scientists define potential long-term business problems and guide related data preparation and machine learning development to solve them.

Senior Data Scientist Responsibilities

• Identify areas for business improvement and how to use data modeling to support strategies.
• Lead machine learning model development projects to forecast business predictions like market trends, customer behavior and investment opportunities.
• Conduct exploratory data analysis and clean data to prepare information for model input.
• Communicate findings to enterprise stakeholders and management. 

Senior Data Scientists Within a Company

Senior data scientists tend to be part of a data science or data analytics team within a company. They may report to a lead data scientist or data science manager.

Importance of Senior Data Scientists

Senior data scientists spearhead data science projects that can identify key business improvement points and support strategy roadmaps. and key improvement points. They also hold expertise in navigating and extracting important information from unstructured data when needed.

What Skills Are Needed to Be a Senior Data Scientist?

Qualifications to Be a Senior Data Scientist

• Three or more years of experience in data analytics, data science, machine learning or similar roles.
• Proven ability in using exploratory analysis and preparing unstructured data to draw conclusions.
• Ability to lead machine learning projects and modeling initiatives. 
• Fluency in Python and SQL for data science.  

Senior Data Scientist Prerequisites

• Bachelor’s degree in data science, computer science, statistics or related field.

Senior Data Scientist Hard Skills

• Advanced knowledge of data analysis, cleaning and preparation.
• Understanding of machine learning, deep learning and modeling tools.
• Expertise in programming and scripting languages (C++, Java, Python, R, Scala, SAS, SQL).
• Experience with statistical analysis and modeling techniques.

Senior Data Scientist Soft Skills

• Analytical thinking skills.
• Project management.
• Problem-solving skills.
• Verbal and written communication skills.

Tools and Programs Senior Data Scientists Use

• C++
• Java
• Python
• PyTorch 
• R
• Scala
• SAS
• SQL
• Tableau
• TensorFlow

How to Become a Senior Data Scientist

Senior Data Scientist Education and Experience

Senior data scientists often have a bachelor’s degree in computer science, data science, statistics or related field. Some senior or management positions may also require a master’s degree in data science, information science or similar.

Candidates must also show advanced experience in the areas of data science, programming languages (Python, SQL), machine learning and modeling technologies, statistical analysis, management and strategic techniques.

Senior Data Scientist Certificates and Courses

• Data Science Accelerator
• 21 Data Science Bootcamps You Need to Know
• 21 Python Data Science Courses and Bootcamps to Know
• 20 Machine Learning Bootcamps and Classes to Know

Senior Data Scientist Career Path

Senior data scientists usually gain experience as junior data scientists, data analysts or related positions before entering the role. After gaining senior experience, professionals can progress into lead data scientist, data science manager and director of data science roles later in their careers.

Senior Data Scientist Salary and Job Outlook

Data scientists job openings are expected to increase 36 percent by 2031.

The full compensation package for a senior data scientist depends on a variety of factors, including but not limited to the candidate’s experience and geographic location. See below for detailed information on the average senior data scientist salary.