You know practically every company out there wants to hire a data scientist. From marquee companies such as Google, Hortonworks, Amazon to startups. And you may be all too familiar with the job description as well — solving complex problems and generating insights with the use of machine learning algorithms, mining and visualization techniques. Secondly, working with clients, program managers and other IT teams and presenting findings in a clear, precise manner.
Many a time, the job description doesn’t end there. Most companies demand out of the box skills and there are some significant changes in data scientist job description templates. While the core skills, breathing statistics remain the same, some job description border on the theoretical end.
Analytics India Magazine lists down some exciting and clearly constructed data scientist job description templates from legacy companies:
Take a look at the data scientist job opening at Menlo Park- based social media giant Facebook.
Here’s their recent data scientist job description for the London office:
Job Summary: We’re looking for data scientists to work on our core and business products (Instagram, Ads, Messaging, Identity, Growth & Engagement, Mobile, Search, Privacy, Payments) to help drive informed business decisions for Facebook. You get to work with richest data sets.
Who’s the perfect candidate: The perfect candidate will have a background in a quantitative field, backed by an experience in working with massive data sets. Should be scrappy, focused on results, a self-starter, and have demonstrated success in using analytics to drive the understanding, growth, and success of a product.
Core responsibilities: The candidate’s core responsibilities range from data mining and presentation of data to informing product launches. Facebook has broken down the role in four parts – working on data infrastructure (Hadoop and Hive); product operations (building dashboards and reports); exploratory analysis (building user behavior models, identifying long term trends) and product leadership (communicating and validating results)
Perquisite Skills: Graduates from engineering, math, statistics, physics or computer science background with an advanced degree. Skilled in programming languages (Python, PHP, Perl) and know-how of the full statistical package (SAS, SPSS, R, MATLAB), knowledge of Hadoop and Hive among others.
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Amazon
World’s biggest online retailer and a leading provider of cloud-hosted services Amazon with a dominant share in retail sales needs “outstanding data scientists to unlock questions about Amazon workforce”.
Job Summary: Amazon is looking for an outstanding Data Scientist for their HR Analytics team and the candidate will be part of their leading research and analysis to unlock questions about Amazon’s workforce. The candidate will work closely with the business and technical teams and deliver analysis for actionable results. The candidate will also build predictive workforce models that have a direct impact on day-to-day decision-making and our HR investments.
Who’s the perfect candidate: Amazon’s perfect candidate is someone with a Masters backed by 4+ years of relevant experience. The candidate should have a background in relational databases, data mining, data transformation and the ability to perform complex quantitative analysis. Needless to say, problem solving skills and a thorough grounding in statistical approaches is a must-have.
Core responsibilities: Some of the core responsibilities include analyzing human resources data to find relationships and trends; develop predictive workforce models for attrition, high performance and recruiting demand; visualization; developing and expanding HR Data Mart and Recruiting Analytics programs through design of reporting catalog and sharing reports, metrics with business leaders.
Perquisite Skills: To make the cut, you have to be a Masters in a technical field, extensive experience in statistical approaches, a focus on customer service, knowledge of SQL and relational database, ad-hoc analysis and metric presentation, adept team player, ability to multi-task and most importantly the ability to handle confidential information. Proficiency in the full statistical suite (R, Stata and SAS) is a must-have and knowledge of HRMS systems is preferable.
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Walmart
Want to know what the world’s biggest retail giant Walmart with plans to corner a big slice of online market needs from their data scientist. Check out Walmart Lab’s Principal Data Scientist job description for California location.
Job Summary: The Fortune 1 Company is looking for phenomenally talented machine learning research scientists for data cleansing, modelling and implementation role. The candidate will contribute to Growth organization within Walmart Labs and will drive personalization, ad-targeting, context extraction and prediction campaigns. The candidate will also focus on building new products for expanding customer base.
Who’s the perfect candidate: The perfect candidate will be backed by an extensive experience in working on large data sets, scaling algorithms to new data sets and should be able to capture business needs and with data modelling initiatives. The candidate will also provide support to other project teams working on email targeting, consumer recommendations in Walmart ecommerce. undoubtedly, statistical analysis and knowledge of system tools such as Hadoop, MySQL and Weka among others are a must-have.
Core responsibilities: The job responsibilities include analyzing massive data sets to create models and algorithms for driving business solutions; interpreting data to find trends that go beyond future data sets; providing insights to cross-functional teams regarding data modelling; ensuring business strategies are aligned across all the initiatives and leading the implementation of data modelling solution among others.
Perquisite Skills: While Walmart Labs hasn’t listed minimum qualifications for this job role, going by their past data scientist job descriptions a PhD in Machine Learning or related field is a must. Also, knowledge of tools such as MATLAB, Ilog and Hadoop is a must. The candidate should also support Walmart’s mission, values and adhere to the company policies.
We hope these data scientist job description templates will help in drawing a clear picture of the industry requirements of the hottest job of the year. Also, Massachusetts Institute of Technology has drawn a data scientist job description template that gives an overview of the role and how to break into. If you aim to be a Googler for life, the search engine giant has listed down their requirements in the most cogent form.
