Senior Data Scientist

The Company

Plum Guide is on a mission to build the definitive collection of the world’s most remarkable home-stays. We are taking a systematic approach to vetting every single home on the planet and accepting only the top 3%. Like a Michelin Guide, but for homes. We do it by putting every home in a destination through a systematic vetting process, which includes identifying candidate homes through proprietary AI, interviewing hosts and sending our Home Critics to visit and test nominated homes in person.

We launched in 2016. Since then we have grown incredibly quickly; expanded to 345 locations in 29 countries; tested over 600,000 homes; and developed a customer experience that’s returning the highest NPS scores in the industry.

About the Data Team

We are a small but high performing team who work with every team across the business as well as building our own projects. We are highly respected in the business and are getting ever-increasing responsibility for delivering new growth opportunities or finding efficiencies. 

Some of the work done by the data team that we have written about:

• CriticNet: Scaling the business with Deep Learning

• CriticNet: Scaling the business with Deep Learning — Part 2

Plum Guide and the Data Team’s focus for the next 12 months is on hyperscale and hypergrowth: taking Plum Guide truly global. This is where you come in.

The Role

We believe in creating the best experience for our guests and hosts while being able to move fast and operate at scale. This role will have a significant impact on improving our search experience as we move towards personalization and surfacing much richer data to our users. 

We also want to be able to find the best homes and ensure they have accurate pricing so our guests know they are getting the best deal. We support this initiative by building sophisticated models to find homes, scraping data and combining it with our own data to price homes correctly.

This role will be in the Data team but there will be significant collaboration with the Product & Tech team to implement these solutions.

Responsibilities

One of the responsibilities of this role is to enable our Search to rank homes in the most optimal manner for a wide range of customer types. We want to be able to show each user the right types of homes at the right time in order to increase our chances of them buying. To do this we need to develop ranking and personalisation algorithms. 

We intend to build some further machine learning models to improve our product and guest experience, this will be a portion of the job.

Additionally, there is some data engineering work that predominantly takes place in Google Cloud: This includes our ETL, airflow orchestration and scraping data.

For the above work, you will take ownership of nearly all aspects of the development process, from concept to development. Almost all our building of new products and deployment now occurs in Google Cloud, so you will have to be proficient in using Cloud technologies (or similar).

We are also very interested to explore your ideas and develop projects as you understand the business and our data. We definitely are at the beginning of an exciting and intellectually stimulating journey.

Finally, you will employ your skills to support the data team in other areas, such as:

• General problem solving and idea generation for improved business performance and efficiency
• Present and communicate findings to stakeholders in compelling easy to grasp ways.

Our data tech stack

• Modern data platform (Snowflake, DBT, Airflow)
• Google cloud platform
• Python
• Pyspark
• Bitbucket pipelines for CI/CD
• Django/Flask Framework

Who we are looking for

You don’t need to have prior experience in hospitality or tech startups. The important thing is that you are:

• Ambitious and with a high standard for what is good enough.
• You care about getting stuff done. And when obstacles inevitably get in the way, you know how to hustle and think creatively in order to find a solution.
• Interested in working in a startup/scale-up across multiple projects rather than 1 single long project.
• Someone who thinks about impact and efficiency rather than what is the most interesting piece of work
• A self-starting learner, confident teaching yourself to do things you have never done before. 
• Someone who’s a team player and a positive, motivated person to be around.
• Organized - able to project manage complex processes with multiple stakeholders.

Requirements

We understand that everyone has different experiences and skillsets and just because you might not fulfil all our requirements it doesn’t mean we won’t talk to you. Feel free to reach out and tell us about your Data Science experience and what you can bring to the Plum Guide.

Essential

• 2-4 years of experience working as a Data Scientist ideally in startup/scale-up, but more established businesses/roles are also welcome.
• High Proficiency in Python and experience with SQL.
• Significant experience with Google Cloud (ideal) or another cloud provider
• Knowledge of a variety of machine learning techniques (clustering, decision trees, neural networks, etc.) and their real-world advantages/drawbacks.
• High attention to detail with a passion for building robust and reliable data sets.
• Passion to investigate new tools and technologies and develop your existing skillset.
• Excellent communication skills with a focused and pragmatic approach to delivering results. 

Nice to have

• Master’s or PhD in Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Data Science or another quantitative field.
• Knowledge/experience of Big Data Frameworks (Apache Spark, Hadoop, etc).

Remote Benefits:

• Competitive salary
• 25 days paid holiday + bank holidays
• Birthday off (because who wants to work their birthdays!?)
• Work from anywhere in the world for 4 weeks of the year
• Discount on Plum stays for Family and Friends

‘Plum Guide is committed to creating a diverse environment and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status’.