Data Scientist
$175,000 - $250,000/year
27 Oct 2025
Boston, MA, USA
About the job
Data Scientist
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Interested in this role? Email us at careers@varderalabs.com
About Vardera Labs
Vardera Labs is building the next generation of infrastructure for the art, auction, and collectibles industry—combining cutting-edge AI, computer vision, and automation to power catalog creation, data strategy, and operational excellence for auction houses worldwide. We’re a small, venture-backed team with a bold mission: to modernize a multi-billion-dollar market at a critical moment of generational ownership transfer and digital transformation.
What You’ll Do
Take raw, messy datasets (images, text, auction results, grading guides) and turn them into structured, production-ready models.
Balance deep statistical rigor with fast-and-loose prototypes — knowing when to fine-tune a foundation model, when to build from scratch, and when to hack something together to get customer feedback quickly.
Define and evolve success metrics: go beyond accuracy to create domain-aware, cost-sensitive measures of error that reflect the real impact on customer workflows and revenue.
Build reporting and monitoring frameworks that track performance by cohort, category, and business outcome — not just model loss curves.
Hustle on speed: ship usable models in days/weeks, not months, while stacking learnings into a long-term defensible data moat.
What We’re Looking For
Background in applied ML and data science (multimodal, embeddings, error metrics, statistical modeling).
Pragmatic scientist — cares less about academic benchmarks and more about minimizing wasted effort while maximizing real-world accuracy.
Fluent in experimentation: can spin up quick tests, evaluate with the right metrics, and pivot without ego.
Hungry to join a post-seed startup where every line of code and every dataset meaningfully moves the business.
Why Join
Founding-team impact in a venture-backed company solving valuation and grading for multi-trillion-dollar asset classes.
A chance to define how AI success is measured in markets that have never had rigorous, transparent metrics.
Report directly to the founders (repeat founders, published AI research) — moving fast, breaking bottlenecks, and scaling across categories.
Compensation
Salary level matching seed-stage hires (relative to experience and fit): $175,000 - $250,000
Equity: Meaningful early equity in a high growth startup
Location
Hybrid with periodic in-person offsites and industry conferences. While we have a bias towards in person in Boston, it’s not required everyday, but expected you spend >50% of your time in the office.
