Sorry, this listing is no longer accepting applications. Don’t worry, we have more awesome opportunities and internships for you.

Data Scientist

BlastPoint

Data Scientist

Pittsburgh, PA
Full Time
Paid
  • Responsibilities

    Salary Range: $100-140K

    About Us

    BlastPoint is a B2B data analytics startup located in the East Liberty neighborhood of Pittsburgh. We give companies the power to solve business problems through discovering the humans in their data and understanding how they think. Serving diverse industries including energy, retail and transportation, BlastPoint’s software platform helps companies plan solutions to customer-facing challenges, from encouraging green behavior to managing customers’ financial stress. Founded in 2016 by Carnegie Mellon Alumni, we are a tight-knit, forward-thinking team.

    Why You Should Work for Us

    • Solve Challenging Problems: BlastPoint’s platform incorporates cutting-edge approaches to geospatial data, psychographic clustering, data enrichment and a dynamic visualization environment, all at scale. We’re working to break new ground by pulling insights from high-dimensional data. And we’re pushing ourselves to try new and better ways to approach every step of our process.
    • Have An Impact : Small but mighty, BlastPoint’s growth is due to big companies increasingly trusting us with supporting key decisions using their most sensitive data. What we do positively impacts the lives of millions of Americans (and beyond).
    • Make Positive Change in the World : Our solutions reduce paper consumption, help struggling families pay their bills, and promote clean energy. We also offer our platform for free to nonprofits and civic-oriented organizations.
    • Employee-Focused Culture : We support the individual needs of our team, from schedule and time-off flexibility to generous compensation benefits. We also tailor growth opportunities, from skills training to industry conferences.

    Job Description

    We’re looking for a thoughtful, curious, and resourceful Data Scientist to join our growing team. You’re comfortable presenting insights to clients, and thrive in situations where you have to learn about and solve a client’s specific problems. This role is the technical face that accompanies our clients’ experience working with us, meaning that you will be the person leading them to solutions by presenting project results, interacting with clients in a consultative manner, and supporting overall customer success. This is a fully-remote position with the option to work from our home office in Pittsburgh, PA, with occasional company meetings in-person.

    Core duties include:

    • Architect, develop and deploy models and algorithms using customer, open source, and proprietary data; assess model quality, and validate and iterate on those models
    • Own the process of integrating customer data, analyzing it using our methodology and your data instincts, and make it deliver value to the customer
    • Evaluate the effectiveness and accuracy of public and private data sources, choose the right ones for our platform, and make them ready to sing harmony to a customer dataset’s melody
    • Help design and automate our customer dataset analysis and insights delivery process, to smoothly handle a wider variety and higher velocity of data
    • Act as the technical bridge between the customer and the product, making our tools useful, relaying product feedback, and customizing to a client’s needs where necessary
    • Leaning on your empathy and leadership skills, you will work with our clients in a consultative capacity, learning about their particular needs and being their advocate both internally and externally. That means participating in client meetings, leading technical discussions, presenting project results, interacting with clients in a consultative manner, and other technical customer-facing engagement, as needed.

    We expect the balance of your work day-to-day to be 60-70% client project-centric work, 20-30% scripting to improve our shared data analytics tooling, and ~10% account management or support needs. The hope is that feedback from your client experiences can directly make our systems more efficient, and eventually more self-serve, reducing the need for clients to have consultative project teams at all.

    Professional Requirements

    • 2+ years of experience in data science or educational equivalent; strong preference for additional experience in software, R&D, consulting or adjacent fields
    • Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience in computer science, mathematics, statistics, economics, or similar
    • Understanding of cluster-analysis techniques (e.g. K-means, DBSCAN, etc)
    • Excellent communication skills; comfortable with and effective at delivering presentations
    • Comfortable with Python and common accompanying tools including Pandas and Scikit-Learn
    • Deep understanding of statistics and other mindsets for building models from data; strong data acumen in translating business problems into supervised/unsupervised machine learning problems.
    • Experience in AWS/GCP/Azure and/or other cloud technologies
    • Comfort with relational database systems and SQL
    • Authorized to work in the United States

    Preferred Skills and Experience

    • Expertise in developing data science pipelines, designing and implementing effective monitoring systems for machine learning models in production, and strong knowledge of MLOps
    • A passion for discovering the secrets and solutions hidden in large datasets
    • Highly attentive to detail, with a skeptical sixth sense about signal-vs-noise
    • Ability to self-motivate, self-organize and work independently in a challenging, fast-paced environment with several ongoing concurrent projects
    • A willingness and demonstrated ability to work collaboratively with a small team; excellent internal communication skills
    • A can-do mentality, with the willingness to roll up your sleeves and take initiative to solve something when necessary
    • Knowledge of a wide variety of machine learning and statistical analysis techniques, their advantages and drawbacks, and areas of best applicability
    • Familiarity with machine learning approaches for time series forecasting and natural language processing (NLP)
    • Curious and eager problem solver, willing to bring new ideas to the team and advocate for best practices, and able to self-teach new skills when needed, with a hunger for building well-designed, high quality solutions
    • Recognition that there are always multiple answers to a problem and the ability to engage in a constructive dialogue to find the best path forward
    • Some experience with ETL processes or Data Prep tools is helpful
    • Experience in or exposure to the constraints of a startup environment is helpful
    • Ability to commute to the Pittsburgh, PA office quarterly, for company-wide meetings, and to travel to client sites when occasionally necessary for a project