Throughline

Technology

Data Scientist in San Francisco

177 postings read · sampled 2026-09-01 · source ats

What employers actually ask for

Credentials named in the 177 postings we read, ranked by how many mentioned each one.

None. Across 177 postings, no certification or licence was named often enough to call it a requirement. For this role in this market, employers are hiring on demonstrated work rather than credentials — which means money spent on a certificate here is unlikely to be what gets you the interview.

Lower signal for this role

Credentials that barely appeared in this sample. That is not a claim they are worthless — plenty are valuable for a different job, a different city, or a promotion later. It is a claim that employers here mostly did not ask.

What the official taxonomy says

O*NET surveys people already doing this job. That describes who got hired over a long window, not what employers are asking for now — where it disagrees with the counts above, the counts are the more current answer.

  • Bachelor’s degree48%
  • Master’s degree44%
  • Associate’s degree or other 2-year degree4%

Job Zone Four: Considerable Preparation Needed. Most of these occupations require a four-year bachelor's degree, but some do not.

O*NET 15-2051.00 · pulled 2026-09-01 · percentages are of surveyed workers, each rounded separately, so they need not total 100

What it pays

BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025. A different survey from the postings above, so the two do not share a sample.

$99,170
10th percentile
$170,110
median
$272,430
90th percentile

Who was hiring

Employers with at least one matching posting in this sample.

OpenAI · Zoox · Roblox · Anthropic · Pinterest · Lyft · Scale AI · Chime · Databricks · Faire · Figma · Mercor · Robinhood · Cursor · Discord · Gusto · Hinge Health · Perplexity · Physical Intelligence · Harvey · Intuitive Surgical · Lucid Motors · Rocket Money · SoFi · Stripe · Achieve · Attentive · Cognition · Decagon · Fanatics Commerce · Instawork · Integrated Resources Inc · Kodiak Robotics · Mach Industries · Nimble Robotics · Notion · Postman · Redwood Materials · Skild AI · SpaceX · Spring Health · Suno · Vercel · Zip

The same role elsewhere

Next

  • Roast and Resolve — Now aim your résumé at this target. Free roast, paid rewrite.
  • Synap — Two-minute daily lessons to drill the skills underneath the credential.