Principal Data Analyst

Job description

Level Up Your Career with Zynga! At Zynga, we bring people together through the power of play. As a global leader in interactive entertainment and a proud label of Take-Two Interactive, our games have been downloaded over 6 billion times—connecting players in 175+ countries through fun, strategy, and a little friendly competition. From thrilling casino spins to epic strategy battles, mind-bending puzzles, and social word challenges, our diverse game portfolio has something for everyone. Fan-favorites and latest hits include FarmVille™, Words With Friends™, Zynga Poker™, Game of Thrones Slots Casino™, Wizard of Oz Slots™, Hit it Rich! Slots™, Wonka Slots™, Top Eleven™, Toon Blast™, Empires & Puzzles™, Merge Dragons!™, CSR Racing™, Harry Potter: Puzzles & Spells™, Match Factory™, and Color Block Jam™—plus many more! Founded in 2007 and headquartered in California, our teams span North America, Europe, and Asia, working together to craft unforgettable gaming experiences. Whether you're spinning, strategizing, matching, or competing, Zynga is where fun meets innovation—and where you can take your career to the next level. Join us and be part of the play! Position Overview : Zynga's data science and analytics team uses our unique and expansive data to model and predict user behavior, making our games more personalized and more fun to play! We strive for a better understanding of our players which translates into challenges and features that delight them and increased social engagement within our games. Here's where you would come in: as a Principal Analyst, you will be a strategic thought leader and technical expert within the analytics organization — setting the bar for analytical excellence, pioneering new methodologies, and shaping the long-term data strategy across one or more studios. You will identify and formalize the most complex, ambiguous problems to understand user behavior at scale. You'll create systems, frameworks, and analyses that fundamentally change how studios think about their players and their business. We will rely on you to influence organizational direction through compelling narratives delivered to both technical peers and executive stakeholders. Your solutions to the problems will need to be demonstrably impactful, scalable, and adopted broadly. You will partner with senior leadership to inform portfolio-level decisions, mentor and elevate fellow analysts, and drive a culture of data-informed decision-making across Zynga. What You'll Do : Define and shape the analytics strategy for one or more games, aligning analytical investment with long-term business objectives Independently identify high-impact, ambiguous problems and drive them from conception to measurable business outcomes — influencing roadmaps and investment decisions at the studio or org level Implement novel analytical methodologies (statistical modeling, ML, causal inference, etc.) and advocate for their adoption across the broader analytics organization Own architecture-level decisions on modeling approaches, data infrastructure, or measurement frameworks that other teams and analysts will build on Deliver analytics and data science projects that substantially move core game metrics, setting the standard for rigor, creativity, and business impact Influence senior and executive leadership through data-driven storytelling, shifting organizational strategy in line with new findings and insights Mentor and develop senior and junior analysts, elevating the craft and building analytical capabilities across the team Drive and empower game studios to make quantitatively informed, evidence-based decisions through scalable source-of-truth data platforms, frameworks, and dashboards Lead the design, testing, verification, and implementation of machine learning models and product features within Zynga's games that impact millions of users Champion best practices in experimentation, data governance, and analytical reproducibility org-wide What You Bring : BS in Computer Science, Math, Statistics, Economics, or other quantitative field; Masters, MBA, or PhD strongly preferred 8+ years of work experience in data science or analytics roles, with progress