Senior Data Scientist, Experimentation

Senior Data Scientists at SpotHero create data products fueled by machine learning under the hood. As a Sr. Data Scientist you work across teams to translate business needs into data science solutions, act as an advisor to stakeholders, and design experiments to validate ideas and assumptions.

SpotHero is in the early stages of investing in our experimentation capabilities and creating an experimentation platform. We are looking for someone with experience in this area to advise us on how best to proceed and roll out this initiative. We are looking for someone who is forward thinking so as to offer opinions on what we should (not) do and be someone who enjoys getting hands on to show us how we should do it. As part of this role, it’ll be important to be an educator / consultant at heart as you’ll be part of highly interdisciplinary teams with varying levels of understanding around statistics and experimental design. As a member of the Data Science squad, you’ll be a point person to tackle more technically challenging problems where it might be necessary to have a deeper understanding of machine learning models, our backend systems / integrations, and asked to conduct deeper research into more advanced testing methods.

In this role, you will…

• Learn about SpotHero’s needs around experimentation and advise us on how to mature our experimentation capabilities

• Create standardized test plans around common experimentation needs and workflows

• Author new and improve existing machine learning solutions to product / business problems

• Educate and train a broad, interdisciplinary team of stakeholders on experimentation theory, concepts, and best practices

• Identify and create opportunities to automate / streamline our experimentation efforts

• Evaluate statistical inference methods to help us control for network effects and cannibalization

• Research and evaluate vendor solutions to assist with our experimentation needs

This is a very broad reaching role as you’ll permeate many different teams across SpotHero and have a strong voice in critical business / product decisions and in driving our innovation efforts.

Who we are: 

At SpotHero, we work as a team to empower people to get everywhere, easier! We’re rapidly growing with the mission of bringing the parking industry into the future through technology. Drivers across the nation use the SpotHero mobile app or website to reserve convenient, affordable parking in advance, on-the-go or through their connected cars, and parking companies rely on us to help them reach new customers while optimizing their business. We connect the dots with cutting-edge technology, delivering value to both sides of this exciting, evolving marketplace..

What will you do:

Statistics/Experimentation (30%)

• Advise non-specialists around statistics and experimental design.
• Review the proposals and analysis of experiments.
• Find opportunities to author test plans and automate experiments.
• Serve as an educator and advisor around statistics / experimentation.
• Research and evaluate vendors for experimentation offerings.

Machine Learning (25%)

• Write concise, modularized code that handles data cleaning, data aggregation, data exploration and statistical or machine learning modeling.
• Build predictive models and machine-learning algorithms.
• Be an active participant in the implementation, deployment and maintenance process of data science models.

Business & Storytelling (25%)

• Understand problems across various business and product domains and translate requirements into data science solutions.
• Present the results of technical work to interdisciplinary audiences using appropriate business acumen.
• Write documentation that is clear and easily accessible to technical and/or non-technical audiences.

Data (20%)

• Analyze large amounts of data to discover trends and patterns.
• Select methods, techniques, evaluation criteria and network with key contacts outside the data organization to obtain results.
• Take clear ownership of initiatives throughout the entire data science life cycle.

The following experience is relevant to us:

• Must have demonstrated experiences with designing and conducting experiments, evaluating the value of machine learning models, and working on interdisciplinary teams.
• Must have a portfolio of authoring data science solutions for a variety of business / product problems in a professional setting.
• Strong ability to communicate with a variety of stakeholders on business and technical subjects. 
• Prior experience gathering requirements from and building consensus with Finance, Marketing, Product, and Sales teams.
• Working knowledge of data science analysis and modeling packages in Python including Pandas, Scikit-Learn, NumPy.
• Solid understanding of a SQL dialect Experience using SQL to read and write relational data, including some experience re-writing SQL queries to improve their performance.

Nice to have:

• Experience with experimentation MLOps solutions such as Databricks, Domino, ClearML, Pachyderm, etc.
• Experience with multiple data platforms and tools (eg. S3, Redshift, Airflow).
• Experience using distributed systems (eg. Spark, Presto, Docker, Kubernetes).
• You have experience contributing to software (pipelines, services and client libraries) that is run in Docker containers, automatically tested on a continuous integration (CI) system, and versioned in git.
• You have written software in Python and you have experience writing shell scripts, Makefiles, or other configuration to glue together these components.
• Familiarity with BI solutions like Looker (preferred), Tableau, Sisense, etc.

Technology we use:

• Our Android Stack is: Kotlin and XML (standard for Android apps) using MVI architecture (still working on refactoring old views), our database layer is built in Realm. Bitrise for CI/CD. We also make heavy use of Dagger, RxJava, Espresso (testing). Network stack uses Retrofit.
  
• Our iOS Stack is: Swift using MVC architecture, CoreData for Local Storage, XCUI for UI Testing, XCTest for Unit testing, SPM for Package Management, Fastlane for app automation and build scripts, Bitrise for CI/CD, and Sentry for crash reporting.
  
• Our Back End Stack is: Monolith using Django/Python/PostgreSQL. We are moving our Monolith to a Modular Monolith, using Domain Driven Design. When relevant we extract specific domains to Services currently using Java, Kotlin and Go. We also use Docker, deploy our apps via Kubernetes. We use Kafka for asynchronous-, and gRPC for synchronous service-to-service communication. Our Integrations are on a .Net CORE, moving to Kotlin.
  
• Our Front End Stack is: Our Front End stack is React/Redux, Sass, Jest/React Testing Library/Cypress, and Webpack. We maintain a private npm repository with shareable UI components, utility functions, Babel/ESLint/Prettier configurations, and custom tasks
  
• Our Data Stack is: Our Monolith Database is Postgres and Redis for caching. We also use Redshift as our data warehouse and S3 as our data lake. The data lake is queried using Presto. We use Airflow and Spark for ETL, as well as do some stream processing (Kafka Streams and Spark at the moment). Our Model pipeline uses scikit-learn, pandas. Our analysts utilize Looker as our Business Intelligence tool. And we use Quicksight for Dashboard on our external Data Products.
  
• Our Dev Tools Stack is: AWS+Kubernetes for hosting. Terraform + Helm Charts for IaaS/Deployment. ConcourseCI for CI/CD. Prometheus/Alertmanager/VictorOps for team alerting. We’re starting to work on multi-region available services.

What we are offering:

• Career game changer – A truly unique experience to work for a fast-growing startup in a role with unlimited potential for growth.
• Excellent benefits – 
• In the US we cover up to 95% of Medical Premiums, 50% of Dental & Vision Premiums, company sponsored Life Insurance, and generous parental leave. 
• In Canada we offer Medical (prescription drug and paramedical coverage), Dental, Vision, Life Insurance, STD and LTD. 
• Flexible PTO policy and great work/life balance – We value and support each individual team member.
• Annual parking stipend – we help people park!
• The opportunity to collaborate with fun, innovative, and passionate people in a casual, yet highly productive atmosphere.
• A workplace recognized as the Best Consumer Web Company by Built in Chicago, Top Company Culture by Entrepreneur, a Top Workplace by Chicago Tribune, and one of Chicago’s Best Places to Work for Women Under 35 by Crain’s Chicago Business. 

Steps to apply: Please include any GitHub account, LinkedIn profile, and any project that you’re particularly proud of. We love seeing work that others loved working on.

At SpotHero, we Respect Fellow Drivers by providing an inclusive interview experience for everyone, including people with disabilities. We are happy to provide reasonable accommodations to candidates in need of individualized support during the hiring process. Please let our team know of your need when you apply or as you begin interviewing with our team.

SpotHero is an equal opportunity employer. We know that a diverse workforce is the strongest workforce, and are committed to building and supporting an inclusive environment for all.