Economist - Causal Inference

Zillow
Seattle - United States
S: Competitive

About the team

Join our industry-leading Economic Research team bringing innovative analysis, creativity and excellence to the U.S. housing market. We create, productionalize, analyze, and share a full suite of housing data products and analysis for an audience inside and outside of Zillow. Our work contextualizes Zillow's unparalleled living database of all homes and hundreds of millions of customers to provide insight to everyday consumers and open data to hundreds of researchers and policymakers across the country. You'll work in an informal, fun, collaborative atmosphere with a dynamic team with a diverse range of interests and skills.

Learn more about what we are doing at https://www.zillow.com/research

About the role

Zillow Group's Economic Research team is looking for a forward thinking and curious Economic Research Scientist who has a passion for applying creative economic thinking to business problems and solve them systematically with mathematical models.

As part of this role, you will:

Apply economic analysis to a host of problems ranging from impact analysis, performance attribution, segmentation, and pricing
Build interpretable models to measure the impact of real estate market developments on Zillow's business and financial performance
Help use our suite of world-class housing market metrics to benchmark Zillow's performance to the market environment
Assist the business in optimizing its response to forecasted or stress test scenarios of the real estate market by suggesting which policies to follow
Build novel analytical frameworks and models from the ground up
Communicate results and insights to business, finance, and partner analytics teams
Work closely with our applied scientists and engineers to productionalize models
Who you are
You will not shy away from ambiguity or complexity. You will develop a deep understanding of our mission, data sources, metrics. You enjoy sitting with the business, learning about the problems they face, and translating them to models. You are eager to use the intuition you've developed in the past, through excellence in education and hands-on experience, to help us derive economic insights from our massive data sets. You are passionate about helping our business succeed by making data driven recommendations based on your analysis.

You will ideally have:

A Masters Degree and 3+ years experience OR a PhD in Economics, Statistics, Mathematics, Quantitative Finance, Operations Research, or a related discipline.
Proven knowledge of either Python or R
Familiarity with SQL
Drive to succeed in a self-starting environment where you can innovate with a high degree of freedom and make a large business impact
Expertise in applied econometrics (Regression and Classification Methods, Causal Inference, Factor Modeling, etc.); knowledge of other areas of statistics and ML a plus
Basic understanding of economic optimization models (discrete choice models, dynamic programming, etc.)
Ability to translate business questions and problems into mathematical models, applying the appropriate level of complexity in each case
Strong written, verbal, and visual communication skills
Experiencing working cross-functionally between business, tech, and science teams

Job summary