Senior Data Scientist

About Pinterest:

Millions of people across the world come to Pinterest to find new ideas every day. It’s where they get inspiration, dream about new possibilities and plan for what matters most. Our mission is to help those people find their inspiration and create a life they love. In your role, you’ll be challenged to take on work that upholds this mission and pushes Pinterest forward. You’ll grow as a person and leader in your field, all the while helping Pinners make their lives better in the positive corner of the internet.

Creating a life you love also means finding a career that celebrates the unique perspectives and experiences that you bring. As you read through the expectations of the position, consider how your skills and experiences may complement the responsibilities of the role. We encourage you to think through your relevant and transferable skills from prior experiences.

Our new progressive work model is called PinFlex, a term that’s uniquely Pinterest to describe our flexible approach to living and working. Visit our PinFlex landing page to learn more.

We are looking for an experienced Data Scientist to join our team and help us grow our international advertising business, international expansion is critical to Pinterest success. As a key member of our team, you will be responsible for developing and implementing innovative and effective data-driven strategies that can significantly enhance decision-making. Accuracy, a keen eye for detail, and a hands-on approach are essential qualities that we are looking for in this role. This role collaborates with Product Managers and Engineering to find the best ways to grow this critical advertising group.

What you’ll do

• Deep strategic analysis to answer core questions such as: How can we help advertisers see better performance? Why do SMB advertisers churn? Who should our target audience be?
• Opportunity sizing and analysis. Write clear, actionable analyses that help teams identify areas of improvement and investment.
• Improve decision velocity and quality using data scientist tool kit: experimentation, causal inference techniques, etc. Design measurement strategy, advise on experimentation best practices, identifying flaws in experiment practices and results; building tools for experiment analysis etc.
• Creating and tracking success metrics. Identify the right measures of success for engineering teams and help them track those metrics. Break down high-level metrics into actionable segments. This work may span from collecting entirely new datasets to building dashboards to track components of a metric
• Improve machine learning models which power notifications delivery and content, via direct contributions, new features/signals, and/or compelling analyses.
• Leadership and Partnership: Lead the scope of work for data scientists in the same area, demonstrating high-quality output of both yourself and others for whom you are responsible. Partner with cross-functional teams to ensure they are held to rigorous data standards and are using data to aid each decision being made.

What we’re looking for:

• 5+ years of combined post-graduate academic and industry experience applying scientific methods to solve real-world problems on web-scale data
• Strong background in statistics, machine learning, and/or experimentation
• Domain knowledge in advertising and product development
• Proven ability to apply scientific methods to solve real-world problems on web-scale data
• Proficiency in SQL/Hive/Python
• Strong proficiency in both English and Mandarin for effective communication with internal teams and external partners.

The best candidates will also have:

• Strong sense of ownership, willingness to dive in and do work, even if it's not the most glamorous, to get the job done. Can work with dirty data sets, do manual labeling, and improvise as needed to work around problems. Works quickly and efficiently, doesn't think any work is below them.
• Impact-driven mindset. Proven track record of making things happen.
• Technical proficiency. Can write efficient SQL queries for many-to-many datasets without erroneous duplication; familiar with left outer join and why it would be useful. Able to write basic code but needn't write elegant solutions to the sorts of algorithm questions often found in coding interviews.
• Strong business / product sense. Ability to ask the right questions (why the work is important, what decisions will help inform it, what an 80% solution will look like). Can explain why past work done was important and justify decisions made. Wants work to be practically applicable and have product impact in the short- to medium-term (< 6 month).
• Data skepticism and curiosity. Doesn't think data or a model can solve every problem; digs into anomalies and wants to understand them. Identifies issues in datasets.
• Strong communication skills. Explains work and thought processes clearly and concisely.
• Desire for simplicity. Don't strive for perfection when a simple solution will do the job. Recognizes that linear models and plain old counting can be very powerful.

Relocation Statement:

• This position is not eligible for relocation assistance. Visit our PinFlex page to learn more about our working model.

In-Office Requirement Statement:

• We let the type of work you do guide the collaboration style. That means we're not always working in an office, but we continue to gather for key moments of collaboration and connection.
• As such, this role will need to be in the office or in front of our customers for in-person collaboration, typically 2 days per week, and therefore needs to be in a commutable distance to our Singapore City based office.

Our Commitment to Diversity:

Pinterest is an equal opportunity employer and makes employment decisions on the basis of merit. We want to have the best qualified people in every job. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion or religious creed, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, status as a protected veteran, physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information or characteristics (or those of a family member) or any other consideration made unlawful by applicable federal, state or local laws. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements. If you require a medical or religious accommodation during the job application process, please complete this form for support.