Applied Scientist - Machine Learning Products

Xero is a beautiful, easy-to-use platform that helps small businesses and their accounting and bookkeeping advisors grow and thrive. 
At Xero, our purpose is to make life better for people in small business, their advisors, and communities around the world. This purpose sits at the centre of everything we do. We support our people to do the best work of their lives so that they can help small businesses succeed through better tools, information and connections. Because when they succeed they make a difference, and when millions of small businesses are making a difference, the world is a more beautiful place.
We build beautiful AI-powered products—products that empower small businesses to succeed by reducing toil and making better decisions.
About the team
We are the Data Team. A collective of specialists driven by our shared mission to help establish Xero as the most insightful and trusted small business platform. Our backgrounds and work are diverse—we work on data platforms, data modelling, application development, applied research, ethics, literacy, and strategy, to name a few. At the heart of our mission is helping our colleagues and customers get value from data responsibly, on robust data platforms, with sound methods. 
Applied Scientists work in cross-functional teams (engineers, designers, product managers, etc) to create AI-powered experiences. We apply machine learning to develop products that reduce toil and provide insight, allowing small businesses to focus on what matters.

About the role

• While Xero's office is situated in Toronto, remote working options are available for candidates across Ontario. There’s a myriad of job titles out there and the English language can only express so much in a couple of words. So role title aside, what we’re looking for is someone to:
• Immerse yourself in vast quantities of messy and complex data, figuring out what it means and whether it’s useful for machine learning product development
• Work on analyses, proofs of concept and production-grade product development using a variety of machine learning techniques
• Generate hypotheses, conduct experiments, and analyze results. Rinse and repeat.
• Collaborate with engineers to build, maintain, and operate end-to-end machine learning pipelines for training and inference at scale
• Stay up to date with developments in artificial intelligence
• Consider the ethics of your work and keep our customers’ interests in focus
• Identify issues with our data and work with teams to diagnose and rectify the problem

About you

• You have 2+ years experience delivering web-scale production machine learning systems
• You rejoice in identifying tough problems that can be solved using scientific thinking, algorithms and analytical data processing
• You read ML research papers, keep abreast of new work on arXiv.org and sometimes spend your time tinkering around with that interesting new framework you read about recently. But ultimately, you relish simple and robust solutions to real problems
• You instinctively seek to understand how machine learning will impact customer experiences and society more broadly
• You have at least a years’ experience working on a team that has delivered a machine learning project to a production environment
• You take pride in writing high quality, documented, and maintainable code
• You know your way around the ‘nix command line, ssh-ing your way into virtual machines or containers; and
• You can write Python, Scala or similar

What you'll bring with you

• Ability to think about both the business and machine learning domains
• Sound software engineering skills in Python, Scala, or similar
• Hands on practitioner skills in one or more of: time series forecasting, natural language processing, classical machine learning, deep learning
• An understanding of the mathematical concepts behind the techniques and toolkits
• Comfortable with version control and command line
• Strong communication skills and the ability to tailor a message for peers, and stakeholders (technical and non-technical)

Why Xero?
At Xero, we are empowered to bring our ‘whole self’ to work. Our collaborative and inclusive culture is one we’re immensely proud of. We know that a diverse workforce is a strength that enables businesses, including ours, to better understand and serve customers, attract top talent and innovate. We care about learning together and celebrate our teams’ continuous improvement and career development. 
We offer a great remuneration package, including compelling benefits and perks, like Xero shares. We also support flexible working arrangements that allow you to balance your work, your life and your passions. Our Canadian Xero family includes Hubdoc, an automated data capture platform and we have offices in Toronto, Calgary, and Vancouver. From the moment you step through our doors, you’ll feel welcome and supported to do the best work of your life.