Data Scientist - Visits

Foursquare is the leading independent location technology and data cloud platform, dedicated to building meaningful bridges between digital spaces and physical places. Our proprietary technology unlocks the most accurate, trustworthy location data in the world, empowering businesses to answer key questions, uncover hidden insights, improve customer experiences, and achieve better business outcomes. A pioneer of the geo-location space, Foursquare’s location tech stack is being utilized by the world’s largest enterprises and most recognizable brands.

Foursquare’s flexible building blocks include technology to maximize marketing impact and drive incremental real-world engagement (Attribution, Audience, Proximity, SDK);  data to deeply understand points of interest and real-world behavior patterns (Places and Visits), and tools to conduct advanced analysis, data enrichment, unification and visualization (Unfolded Studio).

About the team:

The Visits team sits at the intersection of Data Science, Product and Engineering. We are responsible for creating and maintaining algorithms that power our “Visits”, the contextual understanding of what people are actually doing as they move through the physical world. The  person in this role is a hero of big data: operating, monitoring, maintaining and improving data pipelines for 250 million monthly active users and owning a system that ingests 3.5 billion new  location readings every day. 

About the role:

As a new grad Data Scientist at Foursquare, you’ll be responsible for supporting statistical inference, big data analytics, and supervised/unsupervised model building. The methodologies we employ are varied which creates a rich environment for the application of data science technology.This is a massive opportunity for professional development and you will learn many new technologies and techniques during your Foursquare experience.

This is not just a machine learning job. We look for data scientists who are excited by the challenge of solving problems using a wide array of modeling and quantitative techniques. This can involve product feature prototyping, new metric development, and exploratory data analysis.

Data scientists at Foursquare are also highly collaborative, working largely with Product and Engineering stakeholders to deploy machine learning models and analytics processes at scale in production. You should have a growth mindset, deep scientific curiosity, and a collegial spirit – it is through these qualities that we succeed as a team.

Responsibilities of the role

• Work with DS team to design new core algorithms for our data that will power the future of Foursquare geospatial intelligence
• Build supervised/unsupervised machine learning models and support feature engineering
• Perform impact analysis and opportunity-sizing for our work streams and data products. 
• Build statistical inference and big data analytics for geospatial data. 
• Communicate proposals and model developments within the team and more broadly throughout the company to both technical and non-technical audiences 
• Collaborate with software engineers to implement and deploy machine learning models and data analytics into production
• Conduct ad-hoc data investigations for insights extraction and data forensics
• Work with product team and core clients to scope requirements and communicate project status
• Proactively Identify and implement product and process changes to make the platform more efficient and accurate

Minimum requirements:

• Advanced degree (MS, Ph.D) in quantitative field of study (computer science, physics, chemistry, astronomy, applied mathematics, statistics, bioinformatics, etc.)
• Knowledge of ML model creation and execution
• Proficiency in Python and SQL
• Proven track record of practical research endeavors, e.g. publications, patents
• Strong communication skills, record of public presentations

Preferred qualifications:

• Experience with Jupyter, Spark, Databricks, AWS EMR, or similar frameworks
• Experience with some data visualization (Tableau, AWS QuickSight, Grafana, Kepler, Unfolded)
• Comfort with Unix/Linux and the command line
• Experience with geospatial data

Perks and benefits:

• Learning and development programs from individual contributors to managers
• Individual, professional coaching for all full-time employees
• Flexible time off - rest and recharge when you need it!
• Comprehensive and competitive health, vision, dental, life insurance
• 401(k) with company match
• Home office setup: you get all necessary hardware and internet reimbursement 
• Family planning programs via Carrot and Maven
• Employee Resource Groups to help you stay connected

Foursquare is proud to foster an inclusive environment that is free from discrimination. We strongly believe in order to build the best products, we need a diversity of perspectives and backgrounds. This leads to a more delightful experience for our users and team members. We value listening to every voice and we encourage everyone to come be a part of building a company and products we love.

Foursquare is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, protected Veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.