Senior Data Scientist

About Avalanche
Avalanche is transforming how we understand and move people to create a more fair and just world. We are fundamentally changing how public opinion research is done by delivering the deep qualitative insight associated with a focus group at the scale of polling. Avalanche provides progressive organizations with transformative insight to create breakthrough messaging that resonates, mobilizes, and wins. With the backing of leading investors including Higher Ground Labs, Luminate, and New Media Ventures, we are scaling on growth and success in 2021 to meet the demand for our insights from political and advocacy leaders, while expanding our offerings to support values aligned leaders in other sectors.
About the Role:As a Senior Data Scientist on a small team, you will seek to maximize the value that data science and NLP provide across every aspect of our product. You will collaborate closely with product and engineering teams on a wide variety of opportunities, including qualitative coding, text processing, analysis, and visualization. You will consult with and support teams across the organization to build solutions based on a deep understanding of the business and the user.  You will experiment and innovate and develop NLP solutions that advance the product roadmap, and propose solutions to contribute to the shape of that roadmap.

About you:

• You have years of industry experience in data science -- you understand data science product lifecycle and delivery processes
• You love developing NLP applications using text representation techniques and classification algorithms -- you appreciate the nuances of language processing and understand the first principles of the user problems we are solving
• You excel in an early-stage tech startup — you prioritize high leverage decisions, to develop brand new tools and refine existing solutions
• You thrive on a multidisciplinary team --- you confidently provide the expertise that adds unique value and appreciate the perspectives of others
• You build stuff -- you’ve shipped quality products end-to-end, and aren’t afraid to get your hands dirty
• You are not afraid of failure – you love fast cycles of experimentation and learning and are not afraid of failure, instead, you learn from those failures.
• You are curious, innovative, and focused-- you’re up to date on new ML approaches and technologies but aren’t distracted by shiny objects
• You contribute to a thriving culture -- you know that communication, trust, and morale affect performance above all else

Responsibilities:

• In this role, you will report to the Director of Engineering, and collaborate with the rest of the technical team to build data science capabilities and tools that add value for users of the product 
• Manage NLP and Data Science projects end-to-end from conception to completion including research, testing, prototyping, implementation, and collaboration with engineering.
• Lead on the design and implementation of NLP-specific tools
• Develop features that use effective text representations to transform natural language
• Create, refine and maintain best practices and standard processes for data science.
• Collaborate with product, engineering, design, and customer success to understand and meet customer needs.
• Plan and implement data science strategy and roadmap.
• Report your findings and results with the stakeholders.
• Responsible for maintaining data ethics in data science and continuous effort to return any kind of data bias in systems.

Qualifications & Qualities:

• 5-7 years of applied experience working in the field of Data Science with a focus on NLP.
• Master’s or Ph.D. in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, or related field.
• Expertise in NLP techniques for text representation, semantic extraction techniques, data structures, and modeling.
• Experience with Python, SQL, Git, AWS, and other relevant technologies.
• Experience with machine learning frameworks (like Keras or PyTorch) and libraries (like sci-kit-learn).
• A track record of manipulating data, drawing insights from large data sets, and managing code and production models.
• Applied knowledge of real-world advantages and drawbacks of ML techniques including clustering, classification, decision tree learning, and artificial neural networks.
• Experience with applications of advanced statistical techniques and concepts including regression, properties of distributions, statistical tests, proper usage, etc.
• Experience working with and creating data architectures
• Strong collaboration and communication skills.
• Proven ability to build and ship data science forward products for non-expert users.
• A proven track record scoping data science timelines and budgets in the production environment.
• A continuous learning mindset with curiosity about new technologies and techniques

We are committed to building a workplace that reflects the diversity of the communities we serve.
We especially encourage women, people of color, folks who identify as queer and others who are underrepresented in the technology or research field to apply.
We treat our employees like our most valuable asset - because they are!
We offer comprehensive healthcare benefits, 401K or RRSP, perks like transit or parking passes, home office and fitness funds, bookclub, generous vacation and professional development policies to feed your insatiable curiosity! 
Our team is remote. Definitely during COVID-19. Probably forever.
Apply from anywhere in Canada. You will be supported to ensure you have a comfortable remote work set up.  In time, we will reopen offices in Vancouver, BC and co-working hubs in select other locations. For some roles, we have a soft preference for candidates interested in relocation to hubs when the time is right.