We are looking for an experienced Data Scientist to join our growing machine learning (ML) team at PerfectRec.
About PerfectRec
PerfectRec is a machine-learning powered decision engine focused on helping people find good, personalized recommendations without exhaustive research. Our goals are to get each person the best product for them, while saving time and money. We aim to attract billions of users, collectively save them billions and billions of hours on their product searches, and provide a similar amount of value by guiding our users to the right products for themselves at the lowest price.
We are starting with smartphones, laptops and other consumer electronics since there is an immediate and growing need for reliable recommendations for these products. We then plan to recommend other products such as cars and clothing, and then ultimately we’ll expand into other, more complicated decisions such as where to live or work.
Spammy search results, fake reviews, and paid affiliate sites make it nearly impossible to get an honest and relevant product recommendation. Finding the right item to meet your unique needs is tricky. Making the wrong choice based on bad information is a frustrating waste of time and money. We're solving the problem by combining actual human subject-area experts with machine learning to help everyone — regardless of their expertise — find their perfect product, quickly.
A Small Team Where You Can Have A Big Impact
PerfectRec is a small, early-stage startup where you can have a big impact. Our founding team has experience building successful startups in the e-commerce and recommender systems space, as well as working at big organizations, like Google, Amazon, Microsoft and UC Berkeley. We are growing fast, and looking for people who are excited to build a new product where they can have a big impact.
Working At PerfectRec
We are an all-remote company, so we don't care where you live as long as you work well in a fast-paced, collaborative remote environment.
PerfectRec is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are committed to finding the best candidates for every role and giving them the tools and guidance they need to succeed. Our all-remote structure enables us to recruit anywhere in the world, so our talent pool isn't limited to a few big cities, and our asynchronous structure allows our team to work when it's best for them. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.
What You’ll Do
On the ML team you will work on improving and expanding the core decision engine that powers the recommendations at PerfectRec. You will do this by identifying and analyzing problems as well as opportunities, exploring solutions and running experiments, and finally writing the code that puts your solution into practice and taking it live to users.
- Create and explore datasets for powering recommendations, working closely with domain experts.
- Prototype models for making recommendations in new domains.
- Use latest ML technologies such as Neural Networks, Transformers, XGBoost.
- Evaluate and compare different models, analyzing their tradeoffs in order to decide which model to use.
- Add new capabilities that are shared between models in different categories.
- Solve technical problems across the stack and contribute to all parts of our code base, including creation of our internal machine learning library.
- Share your expertise and experience to grow with the team.
- Collaborate with product, design, and engineers to understand customer needs, design solutions, and prototype, launch, and iterate.
- Build a product that is genuinely loved by users and respects their time.
What You’ll Bring
- Strong sense of ownership.
- Clear and concise communication.
- Willingness to learn and teach.
- Creative problem solving.
- Balance of perfection and pragmatism.
Requirements
- MSc in a relevant field (computer science, ML, statistics, math, etc.)
- 2 years of work experience
- Experience applying statistical models and/or machine learning to real-world problems
- Python or at least one programming language such as Java/C/C++
- Knowledge of classical machine learning techniques such as classification, regression, regularization, and cross-validation.
- Proficient in exploratory data analysis and data visualization.
- Excellent team-work and communication skills.
- You’re thought about the problems we’re solving and would find them extremely interesting.
Preferred
- PhD
- 3 or more years of work experience
- Knowledge of Recommender Systems
- Experience writing production-quality code, using version control, making and reviewing pull requests
- sklearn, Keras (or other deep learning frameworks like Tensorflow and PyTorch).
Salary & Benefits
We believe in offering generous compensation and benefits tailored to our all-remote workplace. We pay well because we want to work with highly motivated people that will help make the company successful.
Pay Range and Level of Role: $130,000 - $300,000 salary and stock options which vest over 4 years. We are hiring data scientists with different levels of experience. Compensation is based on background and experience.
Benefits
- 100% remote and no cost-of-living pay cuts.
- We pay 100% of your and your dependents' healthcare premium in a high-quality, national PPO plan for US-based employees.
- You’ll get to use whatever laptop will work best for you.
- Flexible PTO.
- Worry-free sick days.