Senior Data Scientist

About Toptal

Toptal is a global network of top freelance talent in business, design, and technology that enables companies to scale their teams, on-demand. With $200+ million in annual revenue and over 40% year-over-year growth, Toptal is the world’s largest fully remote company.

We take the best elements of virtual teams and combine them with a support structure that encourages innovation, social interaction, and fun. We see no borders, move at a fast pace, and are never afraid to break the mold.

Position Description

Here at Toptal, we always rely on data to guide all of our initiatives. This data helps to mold both our long-term strategy and our day-to-day operations. As a Data Scientist, you will be working with our cross-functional team to model complex problems, use SotA approaches and identify high-impact opportunities. You will be part of a high-energy, fast-paced team responsible for supporting initiatives and operations across the company.

Our full-stack Data Science Team uses Python for research and development and leverages Google Cloud Platform for production implementation. Our wide range of experience includes NLP, graph theory, recommendations systems, supervised and unsupervised problems. As part of the team you are free to use the approach you see fit while relying on your colleague’s previous experience and expertise.

The ultimate goal is to solve real business problems. Our team works on problems that profoundly affect the operation of our business. We address these problems by using predictive models, automating decision-making, and other very open-ended questions. For example, our stake-holders may ask if it is feasible to predict the outcome of a particular process in order to improve our approach or to help them leverage the massive amount of feedback our users provide.

This is a remote position that can be done from anywhere. Due to the remote nature of this role, we are unable to provide visa sponsorship. Resumes and communication must be submitted in English.

Responsibilities:

• Build advanced and explainable models to classify objects, predict outcomes or make recommendations.
• Deploy the models that you build to production by building APIs or leveraging our ETL pipelines.
• Use statistical, algorithmic, data mining, and visualization techniques to model complex problems, find opportunities, discover solutions, and deliver actionable business insights.
• Own your projects and use this autonomy to find creative and innovative ways of solving problems and delivering solutions.
• Handle both parts of the Research & Development process, including clean, rigorous implementations of devised models inside our production environment.
• Be persistent, focused, and well-adapted when it comes to finishing your work. At Toptal, we always drive research from start to finish - we don’t get distracted; we don’t leave anything unfinished.
• Communicate data-driven insights and recommendations to key stakeholders.
• Be in constant communication with team members and other meaningful parties and convey results efficiently and clearly via Slack.

In the first week, expect to:

• Meet the entire Data Science team.
• Get familiar with our best practices guidelines.
• Get access to all our services.

In the first month, expect to:

• Set up your working environment.
• Learn our data sources and get familiar with our data warehouse.
• Meet our friends from the Data Engineering team.

In the first three months, expect to:

• Start reviewing your colleagues’ work.
• Meet our stakeholders and start your first ad-hoc research.
• Get familiar with our Machine Learning implementations.
• Be included in our brainstorming sessions in different areas of Data Science.

In the first six months, expect to:

• Deliver first ah-hoc analysis to our stakeholders.
• Start your first Machine Learning initiative.
• Start contributing to our live ML models.

In the first year, expect to:

• Meet the team in person during our onsite meeting.
• Deliver your first Machine Learning model to production.

Requirements:

• A strong background in advanced mathematics, in particular in probability theory and statistics, data mining, and machine learning.
• You must be able to think critically, to look at the big picture and spot what is missing, taking advantage of it to propose improvements and deliver business insights.
• 4+ years of professional experience in data science, doing exploratory data analysis, testing hypotheses, and building predictive models. Ability to quickly and accurately understand complex new concepts.
• Proficiency in Python and proven experience using popular ML packages (sklearn, keras, word2vec, etc), and previous experience efficiently conducting research and creating ad hoc reports.
• Deliver your work to production as a stand-alone microservice.
• Be enthusiastic about DS and stay up to date with SotA Machine Learning algorithms and developments.
• Be passionate about collaborating daily with your team and other groups while working via a distributed model.
• Be eager to help your teammates, share your knowledge with them, and learn from them.
• Be open to receiving constructive feedback.
• You must be a world-class individual contributor to thrive at Toptal. You will not be here just to tell other people what to do.