Senior Data Scientist - Marketplace Economy, Search & Discovery

Every day, tens of millions of people come to Roblox to explore, create, play, learn, and connect with friends in 3D immersive digital experiences– all created by our global community of developers and creators. 

At Roblox, we’re building the tools and platform that empower our community to bring any experience that they can imagine to life. Our vision is to reimagine the way people come together, from anywhere in the world, and on any device. We’re on a mission to connect a billion people with optimism and civility, and looking for amazing talent to help us get there. 

A career at Roblox means you’ll be working to shape the future of human interaction, solving unique technical challenges at scale, and helping to create safer, more civil shared experiences for everyone.

About the Role:

Why Data Science & Analytics?

The Data Science & Analytics organization's mission is to increase our speed, frequency and acumen of making decisions at scale by instilling a data-influenced approach to building products. We cover a wide area of the data spectrum including analytical data engineering, product analytics, causal inference, economics, statistical modeling and machine learning. Aligned and partnering with product verticals, we use this extensive toolbelt to discover new opportunities and unmet use cases, influence and shape the product roadmap and prioritization, build data products and measure impact on our community of players and developers.

Why Marketplace, Search & Discovery?

As a Data Scientist / Economist on Marketplace Economy S&D, you'll be the champion of the user experience – methodological development and application to drive material improvements in item recommendation effectiveness and salience, and advancing marketplace monetization for creators. Your contributions and innovations will bring joy to our engaged users, and advance their engagement and personalization. You will partner with Product, Engineering, and Machine Learning Eng (MLE) leadership and teams to create and strategize on new features, signals, insights, and algorithms to improve our recommendations. In this critical role, you will lead in the refinement and expansion of the central marketplace for creators, designing and running experiments and utilizing scaled causal inference approaches to advance incrementality and effectiveness.

You Are:

• An expert in data and applied methodologies. You use cutting-edge techniques (or develop new ones) to extract value and drive insights for strategic topics.
• A strong communicator. You understand that analysis must be presented in meaningful ways and lead spirited discussions about the findings. You can explain technical concepts to non-technical audiences and discuss appropriate tradeoffs.
• Passionate about developing other technical talent. You are motivated to share your expertise and develop other team members while leading your own space.
• Expert in data transformation and programming, using languages including Python, R, and SQL. You are experienced in automating efforts and crunching massive volumes of data using big data frameworks such as Spark, Hadoop or Flink.
• Excited about free, scalable coding education. You are excited by the opportunity to engage millions of children and youth in learning programming through play. You enjoy thinking about the levers to engage more players to become developers.

You Will:

• Accelerate product development through your understanding of the underlying data and your ability to partner with product and technical leaders to provide insights that enhance growth
• Access raw data, and then transform it, analyze it, and render it in a compelling way – all using a custom analytics tool kit built from state-of-the-art open-source libraries
• Accelerate product development through the application of models to enhance growth and improve the product experience
• Design science roadmaps and experimentation agendas to determine success of product feature launches
• Partner with MLE teams to productize science prototypes that drive positive outcomes for our developer community and advance incentives for creation
• Report to the Senior Director, Data Science on the Economy team.

You Have:

• Advanced Degree and/or PhD in Economics, Statics, Applied Math, Physics, or other quantitative fields
• 7+ years of industry experience in data science, economics, analytics, or machine learning engineering
• 5+ years of experience using scripting languages (Python, R), and big data query/processing languages and tools such as SQL, Hive, Spark and Airflow
• 5+ years of experience in one or more scripting languages such as Python or R
• Additional experience in varied industry settings advancing technical methods and developing production models
• Experience working with content platforms, specifically user-generated content
• Ability to apply creative first-principles reasoning to solve ambiguous problems

For roles that are based at our headquarters in San Mateo, CA: The starting base pay for this position is as shown below. The actual base pay is dependent upon a variety of job-related factors such as professional background, training, work experience, location, business needs and market demand. Therefore, in some circumstances, the actual salary could fall outside of this expected range. This pay range is subject to change and may be modified in the future.  All full-time employees are also eligible for equity compensation and for benefits.Annual Salary Range$310,270—$359,170 USD

You’ll Love: 

• Industry-leading compensation package
• Excellent medical, dental, and vision coverage
• A rewarding 401k program
• Flexible vacation policy
• Roflex - Flexible and supportive work policy 
• Roblox Admin badge for your avatar
• At Roblox HQ: 
• Free catered lunches five times a week and several fully stocked kitchens with unlimited snacks
• Onsite fitness center and fitness program credit
• Annual CalTrain Go Pass

Roblox provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation and training.