Data Scientist - Algorithms

Wayfair
Boston - United States
S: Competitive

We're seeking a talented data scientist interested in developing and deploying models with high business impact.

You have very strong coding skills (though not necessarily software engineering experience), and you want to improve and leverage them on data science projects. You're passionate about using advanced statistical methods to tackle tough problems as a data scientist and also about wrapping your solutions in clean code to make data products that are "built to last."

About Algorithms Unit:

Algorithms Unit is a close-knit group of data scientists within the Pricing & Profitability team that is responsible for dynamically adjusting prices on millions of products worldwide.

As the largest and fastest growing e-commerce technology company in the home space, Wayfair interacts with a large volume of product data, user data and order data. This makes predictive analytics solutions critical to managing prices and providing core business solutions. Algorithms Unit develops solutions that affect billions of dollars in revenue and has end-to-end responsibilities for projects. These include data exploration, model selection, optimizing fit, running machine learning algorithms at scale and iterating with experiments for long-term improvement.

Candidates should be data-savvy, have strong coding skills, and be driven to complete projects that make a business impact at scale. In this role you will work with a talented and diverse group of PhDs, data scientists, economists, business analysts as well as software engineering teams, so excellent communication skills and keen business sense are crucial.

Responsibilities:

Develop algorithms that impact billions of dollars in revenue relating to pricing, costs, and other business problems
Evaluate performance of current models and iterate on optimization (feature engineering, model selection, parameter tuning)
Scout areas of opportunity, create and lead projects from start to finish
Write production code and make valuable contributions to the Algorithms Unit toolkit (reusable code)
Maintain machine learning models, data processing stages, and scheduled jobs

Qualifications:

BA/BS/MA/MS plus 2-4 years' experience working with data, or PhD
Degree in any quantitative field where data and statistics are important, or mathematics
Strong statistical background; machine learning experience highly valued
Strong programming skills relevant to data science:
Preferred stack: Python + IPython Notebook, NumPy, pandas, machine learning packages
R, Matlab and other data/statistical language experience also valued
Excellent communication skills, including summarizing/describing your projects
Projects demonstrating data prowess and/or coding prowess
Excellent communication skills, including summarizing/describing your projects

Bonus:

Programming experience on non-data related projects in any languages
Experience working with data in a business context
Experience with SQL or other databases
Experience with big data (Hadoop, Spark)
Experience with Git, GitHub, bash / UNIX scripting

Job summary