Principal Data Analyst

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 modelling, ML, causal inference, etc.) and advocate for their adoption across the broader analytics organization • Own architecture-level decisions on modelling 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 progressive increases in scope and impact • Fluent in SQL; strong programming skills in Python; adept in atleast one visualization tools such as Tableau, Looker, or equivalent • Deep expertise in statistics, experimental design, causal inference, machine learning, and/or deep learning — with a track record of production-scale deployment • Extensive experience analyzing large datasets • Proven track record of leading complex, ambiguous, cross-functional initiatives from problem framing through production impact, with minimal direction • Demonstrated ability to influence senior leadership and drive org-wide strategic change through data • Experience mentoring and growing other data scientists and analysts • Proven ability to define analytics strategy or build analytics capabilities from the ground up • Exceptional written and oral communication skills — able to translate complex analysis into clear, actionable narratives for executive audiences • Ability to operate with high autonomy in ambiguous, complex problem spaces with minimal direction • Ability to collaborate effectively across disciplines — engineering, product, design, marketing, and studio leadership — to deliver unambiguous business impact • Strong passion for gaming! Bonus Points : Experience in gaming, mobile, or consumer tech industries. What We Offer You : Zynga offers a world-class benefits package that helps support and balance the needs of our teams. To find out more about our benefits, visit the Zynga Benefits We are proud to be an equal opportunity employer, which means we are committed to creating and celebrating diverse thoughts, cultures, and backgrounds throughout our organization. Employment with us is based on substantive ability, objective