---
title: 'Data Scientist at Petra Labs'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/data-scientist-petra-labs-new-york-g8vgpexc0p38'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-15'
---

# Data Scientist at Petra Labs

- **Company:** Petra Labs
- **Location:** New York, NY
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-09-29
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-15
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/petra-labs/965b5c3c-41cd-4b38-94c1-62b0b7a98ff5

## Job description

## About Petra Labs

Petra Labs is building the attribution and experimentation layer for AI search. We believe the future of commerce will be shaped by AI-driven information retrieval, yet most companies lack the infrastructure to understand and capitalize on this emerging growth channel. Petra Labs uses large-scale simulations, agentic analysis, and deeply embedded integrations to turn AI search from a black box into a measurable growth channel teams can rigorously optimize and allocate spend against. Raised $5.2M in funding from Work-Bench, Pathlight, and Afore. We work in our SoHo, New York office.

Culture

- We hire a small number of extremely talented people and give them as much ownership and autonomy as possible.
- We are truth-seeking. Transparent, direct discourse is encouraged. We challenge existing beliefs in pursuit of always getting better.
- We work hard and are unapologetic about the level of effort required to build a generational company.

## What You'll Do

- Drive our research. Shape the direction of in-house research on how consumer LLMs search, reason, and synthesize sources. Stay on top of frontier AEO/GEO research, form hypotheses, and test them with scientific rigor. Your work will be published.
- Set the standard for data-driven decision making. Support the product and engineering teams with the analysis and experiments behind key product decisions, from our agent evals to changes in our core analytical pipelines.
- Run experimentation and causal inference. Design and analyze experiments, and build measurement even when clean A/B tests aren't possible.
- Turn research into a product. A finding about model behavior is only true for the moment it was measured, and the models change constantly. Build the data pipelines and recurring measurement that keep our research live rather than a snapshot, and push the durable findings into the product.

You'll Excel in This Role If You

- Are an expert in Python and SQL
- Have strong statistical and experimentation foundations in experiment design, effect estimation, and evaluation metrics
- Have built in early-stage, nebulous environments and can strike the right balance between speed and rigor
- Communicate clearly in writing and in person, and can influence stakeholders with evidence

## About Petra Labs

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Petra Labs is an AI search marketing platform and services company that helps enterprises optimize, measure, and manage their brand presence across AI-powered search engines.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Seed stage)
- **Headquarters**: New York City, New York, United States
- **Founded**: 2025
- **Founders**: Sami Akkawi, Rishi Penmetcha, Ramie Khoury

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: AI Search Marketing / Enterprise Marketing Technology (MarTech)
- **Target customers**: Enterprise B2B, Growth-stage companies, and marketing teams focused on AI search visibility (AEO - AI Engine Optimization)
- **Mission or purpose**: To help enterprises turn AI search into a defensible revenue channel by providing the software, strategy, and execution needed to win in AI-powered discovery.

## Products & Services
- **The Petra Engine (Platform)**: A proprietary AI search marketing platform that provides competitive intelligence, visibility tracking, sentiment analysis, and chain-of-thought data across major AI engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, etc.). It surfaces real user queries from panel data and custom integrations.
- **Full-Service AEO Team**: A hands-on, end-to-end service layer that executes strategy based on platform insights. Includes owned media (content, technical SEO), earned media (citation placements), social media management, and programmatic AEO.
- **Custom Attribution Modeling (MMM)**: Builds custom Market Mix Models to connect AI search visibility, earned media, and other levers directly to pipeline and closed revenue, solving for the "dark traffic" problem of AI referrals.
- **Strategy & Consulting**: Provides a roadmap reverse-engineered from platform citation data, including prompt mapping, competitive threat analysis, and business intelligence.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Total Funding (Seed round); amount not publicly disclosed. Revenue model is service-led with platform licensing.
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Not publicly disclosed.
- **Growth Signals**:
    - **Headcount**: 10 employees (as of mid-2026), with a monthly growth rate of +33.3% on LinkedIn.
    - **Traffic**: Website traffic growing at +44.9% month-over-month.
    - **Client Results**: Case studies show clients achieving 27x AI search traffic in 6 months and AI referrals becoming 25% of net-new revenue.
    - **Market Position**: First-mover in the "enterprise AEO platform + services" category, competing with traditional SEO agencies and pure-play AI monitoring tools.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Full-stack approach**: Combines proprietary data (chain-of-thought, panel data) with a dedicated execution team, unlike pure-software tools or traditional agencies that lack the technology layer.
- **Attribution expertise**: Solves the "dark traffic" problem—AI referrals that show up as direct/organic in standard analytics—by building custom MMMs, making AI search a measurable and defensible budget line.
- **Chain-of-thought data**: Captures the hidden reasoning and interim citations of AI models (sources the model consults but doesn't cite), providing unique competitive intelligence.
- **Founding team pedigree**: Founders and early team have backgrounds from McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and top consulting firms, bringing a high level of strategic rigor.

## Strategic Focus
- **Product-led growth**: Building the platform to be the "source of truth" for AI search performance while using the services team to drive adoption and ROI.
- **Category creation**: Establishing "AI Search Team" as a new category alongside SEO and SEM, targeting enterprise CMOs and heads of growth.
- **Attribution as a wedge**: Using proprietary attribution models to prove ROI and lock in long-term enterprise contracts.
- **Scale the team**: Actively hiring for founding engineers, strategy & ops, and growth roles to build the core team.

## Why Work Here
- **Founding team opportunity**: As a 2025 startup, new hires get to shape the product, culture, and strategy from an early stage.
- **High-impact work**: Directly building the infrastructure and playbook for a new category (AEO) that is rapidly growing in importance.
- **Culture & Perks**:
    - **Hybrid/In-Office**: Described as a "Hybrid Workspace" with a strong in-office presence in New York City (likely 3-4 days/week).
    - **Equity**: Roles list "Equity" as a benefit, standard for early-stage startups.
    - **Team**: Small, high-caliber team (10 people) with backgrounds from top-tier firms (McKinsey, AWS, Goldman Sachs).
    - **Role variety**: Engineers and operators will have broad ownership across the stack and business, not siloed.
- **Notable for job seekers**: The company is actively hiring its first few engineers and operators, offering significant upside and influence.

## Sources
1. [petralabs.com](https://www.petralabs.com/)
2. [LinkedIn - Petra Labs](https://www.linkedin.com/company/petra-labs-ai)
3. [Built In - Petra Labs](https://builtin.com/company/petra-labs)
4. [Petra Labs Solutions Page](https://www.petralabs.com/solutions)
5. [Petra Labs Jobs (Ashby)](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/petra-labs/23a973ba-907c-44ef-9c66-a88247d8d0f6)

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