Senior Data Scientist
PepsiCo · Plano, TX
$93,500–$156,450from the description
Jul 16, 2026
Plano, TX
Jul 21, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A senior individual contributor and small-team lead role centered on owning and evolving a North America retail demand-forecasting platform. Day-to-day work involves building and improving statistical and machine-learning forecasting models in Python on cloud infrastructure, governing the product roadmap, and collaborating with demand planners across business units. Suits an experienced applied data scientist with a background in production forecasting systems and some people-leadership experience.
Senior level · 7+ years · National · Bachelor's required · Full-time
Advertised as Principal, but the requirements read as Senior.
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Rare in this occupation — lead with these, and say what you built with them.
Most people in this occupation already list these. Still required — just not what gets you shortlisted.
What the occupation pays Median $122,874 (middle half $87,544–$162,374). This posting is about at that midpoint.
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (6)
No specific work location is stated in the posting; the CBSA and state fields are left blank. The San Francisco and Los Angeles fair-chance ordinance references suggest the role may be open to candidates in those metros, but no primary location is confirmed.
The title 'Associate Principal Scientist' maps to the level advertised in the title Principal; however, the actual requirements (7+ years, small-team tech lead, single-product ownership) are consistent with a Senior-level role rather than a true org-wide Principal.
The alt SOC (15-2031 Operations Research Analysts) is noted because the role centers heavily on demand forecasting and supply-chain analytics, which straddles data science and operations research; 15-2051 wins on the ML/modeling emphasis.
Master's degree is listed as preferred, not required; Bachelor's is the stated minimum hard requirement.
Azure is listed under the required Technical Skills section with an 'e.g.' qualifier, indicating a cloud analytics platform is required but Azure is the named example; AWS and GCP are listed as alternatives.
Hierarchical/category-level demand forecasting and scenario simulation appear only under Preferred Qualifications.
Read the full posting
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