Director, Data Science - Upwork

The Analytics, Data Science, and Economics team is looking for an experienced Director of Data Science to guide strategy and decision-making across the company across a variety of teams and levels. Data Scientists at Upwork work to uncover insights through machine learning techniques and turn them into relevant recommendations, driving decisions for all areas of the organization. This is a unique opportunity to build a function from an early stage.

Your Responsibilities:

• Use quantitative analysis and the presentation of data to see beyond the numbers and understand what drives our business
• Lead a team to develop models that provide insights to help business and product leaders understand marketplace dynamics, customer value, user behaviors, fraud activities, and long-term trends
• Hire, scale, and develop a team of data scientists 
• Establish robust processes to select models to pursue in partnership with the business, drive follow through, and establish an operating rhythm to revisit and retrain models
• Collaborate with our machine learning engineering and data platforms teams on tooling and shared feature stores
• Get hands on to deploy prototype models into production that customize product experiences
• Evangelize data science techniques within the broader Analytics, Data Science, and Economics team and mentor others seeking to develop more advanced capabilities

What it takes to catch our eye:

• A degree in Math, Physics, Statistics, Economics, Computer Science, or a similar domain
• A strong track record of managing data science teams
• Experience working with user segmentation, cohort analyses, mix modeling, random forest, regression models, and other advanced techniques
• The insight to take ambiguous problems and solve them in a structured, hypothesis-driven, data-supported way
• Passion for getting into the details
• Proficiency in Python
• Previous experience in a two-sided marketplace or ecommerce business