Lead Data Scientist, Recommendations

The Role: 

Using quantitative data to model user behavior on Newsela, you will lead data science projects to drive high level decisions as well as day-to-day development on the team to build out a suite of recommendation systems for Newsela. You will be collaborating closely with the product and systems engineering team to deploy the research from the team to live users. Your goal is to improve the ease of discovering content for teachers in their lesson plans and to recommend to students to improve their educational outcomes. You’ll advise the team on research that translates into solving real-world problems, with an emphasis on live testing. Your work is driven by practical applications, continuously tying development to tangible outcomes based on the product roadmap. You’ll also help to establish KPIs and metrics for recommendation systems, both offline and online.

Why You’ll Love This Role: 

Reporting to the Director of Data Science, you’ll work closely with data scientists, engineers, product, and content teams to improve content discovery. As a data science lead on the team, you’ll be encouraging thought leadership, evangelizing new technologies, and keeping up to date on the latest research. You’ll cross-pollinate ideas with the search team and delve into information retrieval techniques. You’ll be at the forefront of using cutting-edge technologies to improve the learning experience of K-12 education across the nation. You’ll have the opportunity to build a complex system from the ground up and be part of a culture that values teaching and learning. And you’ll have the ability to shape the recommendations roadmap with partnership from the product team.

Why We’ll Love You:

You have 5+ years of practical machine learning experience in industry, building out machine learning systems in production, and have experience with showing users the content they want to see (such as media, e-commerce, advertising). You understand the complexities of building out live machine learning pipelines in production, and have experience choosing metrics to monitor as well as understand tradeoffs between modeling decisions. You prefer deploying practical solutions to test rather than researching theoretical ideas without live data. Ideally, you’ve worked on recommendation systems in the past. You think about the architecture and system of interactions between different algorithms. Bonus if you have experience with knowledge graphs and how it relates to content, experience with NLP, or topic modeling. You love learning more about information retrieval. You are fluent in SQL and Python (or other scripting languages), and you are comfortable using git and Linux environments. You have experience working alongside product managers to take business outcomes and break them down into projects. You are passionate about improving literacy for students and empowering teachers to find the best content for the classroom.

 About Newsela:

One of the fastest growing tech companies in K-12 education, Newsela was founded on the principle that while every child may have unique learning preferences, they all deserve a rich learning experience that ignites a love of learning. We built our platform based on learning science research to deliver the most engaging, authentic content to modernize how teaching happens in the classroom. Along with interactive assessments and tools, we provide teachers with digital content at five reading levels -- from +100 of the best sources -- that is relevant to the diverse backgrounds and interests of their students. Since we started in 2013, we’ve established a presence in 90% of U.S. K-12 schools and over 2.5M teachers and 37M students have registered with Newsela.