Data Scientist

FindHotel is looking for a Data Scientist to join our team and help us push our data driven organisation to even higher levels. We are looking for someone with a strong academic and/or business background in machine learning, statistics and programming, and with a keen interest in applying machine learning to real business problems.  The Data Scientist will be leading a variety of projects that aim to automate decision making in core business processes.

 

What you'll be doing:

Use historical data to build accurate models of KPIs for our performance-based marketing campaigns: customer value, competition, etc.

Optimize the targeting and pricing of our SEM campaigns.

Use Machine Learning to make our website as effective as possible: e.g. by providing visitors the recommendations that are most relevant to them.

Closely collaborate with our developers in the deployment of data science products to our production systems.

Continuously research new data sources, methods and technologies.
What a day in the office might look like:

In our daily standup our analysts have mentioned that European travelers tend to make more expensive bookings when traveling far away from home.  They also seem to have a preference for hotels with certain features (e.g. free Wifi, on-site parking, etc). However, data is very scarce and the analysts don't know whether these findings can be used to optimize our European Adwords campaigns. Considering the scale of the European market, any minor optimization in our campaigns can have a great impact in the business, so you decide to take a closer look. You start the morning by getting a relevant historical dataset from our data warehouse, cleaning it, and preparing it for exploration with your favourite tools.  After your morning exploration on the you data, you end up with a list of data manipulation and modelling approaches that you think could lead to specific improvements in our campaigns. You will then spend the rest of the afternoon setting up a simple model validation framework that will allow you short list your most promising ideas, so that you can focus on optimizing only those in the following days.

 

The squad:

You will be working with a multidisciplinary squad of analysts, data scientists and engineers, and a product owner.

 

Why join now?

• We have just transitioned the product to a new platform, built a local team of 6 experienced product developers, and are looking to grow traffic from 1.5M monthly visitors to 10M+ within the coming year, through product improvements
• Completing our mission goes through rapidly evolving our product to become an efficient tool users love. Doing that in a niche as large and as competitive as online accommodation is a rare opportunity to make a dent in the online world.
• We are a profitable company that grew from 12 to 26 team members in the past year, with a strong user-acquisition engine and a lot of room to grow. It's an exciting journey in a company that's driven by data.

 

What we offer:

• The opportunity to work in a diverse international team in a start-up environment
• An agile environment where communication and initiative are valued and cherished
• No nonsense! We’re proud of our flat hierarchy and short democratic decision paths
• A fun work environment that includes a delicious lunch, fruits & snacks, beer tap, ping pong and foosball
• Competitive compensation package including bonuses and Stock Appreciation Rights
• Flexible time off vacation policy
• Great new spacious and light-filled office located in central Amsterdam

People we like:

• Curious, not afraid to make mistakes and willing to question the status quo.
• Professional experience building models that produce actionable insights from complex datasets, preferably in a startup-like environment.
• Ability to work with very large datasets.
• Very good programming skills, preferably in Python and/or Scala.
• Experience using a variety of scientific computing and statistical tools.
• Detail oriented, but practical enough to avoid perfectionist pitfalls.

People we love:

• 3+ years of relevant business experience.
• Experience with Bayesian data analysis techniques and tools.
• Comfortable working with a large variety of data stores: Redshift & PostgreSQL, MongoDB, ElasticSearch, AWS S3, AWS Kinesis, etc.
• Experience with Apache Spark.
• Experience with cloud computing solutions, in particular in AWS.
• Experience working together with developers to deploy ML models to production environments.
• Interest and willingness to learn about online marketing and travel.
• Motivated and driven to take responsibility and succeed in a start-up environment.
• MSc or PhD in statistics, engineering, computer science, artificial intelligence or related field.