Data Scientist (Remote)

About the company

Borg’s mission is to advance humanity toward perfect information. 

Imagine a world where finding just the right person to solve the problem you have is nearly instant and effortless. A world where you easily connect with the ideal lawyer, therapist, or doctor no matter the rarity of the condition or the complexity of the issue. A world where you can easily find the right investors for your business or an art project. 

This vision extends beyond individual benefits; it has the power to revolutionize our global infrastructure. Economic growth accelerates as entrepreneurs and investors effortlessly find their perfect match, ensuring capital is directed where it can be most effective. Scientific innovation leaps forward as researchers across the globe easily identify and collaborate with peers tackling complementary challenges.

In this world, the obstacle of locating the right expertise is drastically reduced. Borg is dedicated to making this vision a reality.

About the team

In this role you will work on a small, but extremely dynamic and competent data science team. This is one of those rare places where you will be pushed to your limits and learn a lot in short time. Due to the cutting-edge nature of our work, we attract exceptionally ambitious and skilled data scientists, but the pace can be demanding.

Rather than relying on traditional performance metrics, we are driven by the desire to earn the respect of our peers. The team meets daily on a Zoom call, and each data scientist presents their progress. There are no KPIs, OKRs, etc.; if you see your colleagues presenting impressive work daily, you do not want to be the only one with nothing to show.

This environment is not for everyone. If your priority is work-life balance, this is probably not for you. However, if you are competitive and value being surrounded by competent and driven people working towards an ambitious goal, you will love it here.

The company is still small <10, so you will work directly with everyone. You will interact daily with both the CEO and the CTO. Everyone must be on the daily call, but other than that, you make your own hours.

About the role

As a data scientist, you will work with other data scientists to make the most accurate understanding of everyone's public digital footprint.

You will be discovering, defining, and working on problems that nobody has solved before with some of the smartest people.

You can find interesting problems and propose to work on them as long as they fit within the larger scope of research and business goals of the organization.

You will have freedom in choosing how to approach solving problems you are working on and which technologies to use. If you can show that it's the best way to solve the problem at hand, all tradeoffs considered, you can use it.

Responsibilities

• Envision, implement, and validate algorithms that aggregate complex, textual and graphical data into comprehensible descriptions of social networks.
• Planning and coordination of data modeling & acquisition strategy, feature releases.
• Close cooperation with the product team in translating planned product features into algorithms/metrics and vice versa.
• Close cooperation with the development team in shaping our IT strategy and ensuring the robustness of production algorithms.
• As a DS evangelist, you will familiarize other team members with our models to the extent and level of detail necessary for them.

Requirements

• 3+ years of experience modeling large, complex data sets.
• Experience designing models and evaluating the trade-offs between accuracy, efficiency, complexity, interpretability, etc.
• Appreciation for the unique challenges of networked data (in comparison to tabular, textual, or image data).
• Comprehensive understanding of the fundamentals of data science: classification, regression, clustering, dimensionality reduction, deep learning etc.
• Advanced coding skills in Python, familiarity with Docker, AWS.
• Ability and willingness to rapidly learn advanced topics in network science and machine learning.
• Ability to prototype rapidly and also ship maintainable, production-ready code.
• A growth mindset, being able to balance long term objectives with the immediate development needs of the company and translate them into data science initiatives.
• You can communicate concepts at different levels of complexity i.e. you can change your explanation depending on the audience. You think of what information the person you are talking to needs and you frame it in the context useful to them.
• You're highly collaborative with strong verbal and written communication skills.
• You enjoy writing documentation and understand why it's valuable.

Great to Have

• BS/MS/Ph.D. in Computer Science, Data Science, Mathematics, or a related technical field.
• Familiar with advanced topics in network science or graph ML: advanced community detection algorithms (local/overlapping/fuzzy/hierarchical/statistical inference), community search, graph diffusions, spreading processes, vertex similarity, hypergraphs, mesoscale structure (assortative, core-periphery, etc.), k-cores/trusses/cliques, graph signal processing, graph neural networks (GNNs), geometric deep learning, heterogeneous or multilayer graphs.
• Familiarity with other relevant topics: data visualization (especially graph visualization), NLP (Transformers, LLMs, contrastive models, sentence embeddings, topic modeling, finetuning, etc), recommender systems, fairness/bias in ML, graph databases, advanced clustering (nonlinear dimensionality reduction, topological manifold learning), etc.
• Knowledge of the fundamentals of modern deep learning, including experience with PyTorch, TensorFlow, etc.
• Experience building production-ready recommender systems.
• Comfortable with seeking out and reading the latest research papers in relevant fields.
• Experience implementing algorithms at a low level from scratch in C++, Rust, etc.
• Interest in sociology, anthropology, evolutionary psychology, game theory, or related fields.
• Interest in design, user experience, or related fields.
• Deep familiarity with some online cultures, sub-cultures, memes, etc. and a power user of some social media platforms

Benefits

Work Setup

We're a fully remote team working from all parts of the world, but with two hubs being Austin, TX and Berlin, Germany. We typically have a daily standup call and work mostly asynchronously apart from that. We are heavy users of the tools for remote work, and we continue testing new tools as they come out to make sure we have the best stack possible.
If you work from Berlin, you can work from our Berlin office in Mitte.

Application Process

We hire for ability, not credentials. You will notice that this is reflected in our recruiting process. The process is designed to test your ability to solve problems that you will face in the role you are applying for. There won’t be any brain teasers or anything else unrelated to what the job will be.

We invest tens of hours carefully crafting descriptions and the corresponding questions for each role. We spend so much time because we found this to be a good investment. These ads and their corresponding questions have proven to be an excellent filter. Make sure not to skip any questions – they are (by far) the most important part of the application.

If we like your answers, we will schedule the first interview. There are typically three interviews (+/-1) in total. For some roles, you may receive a take-home task that should take about 2-3 hours to complete. After that, we will ask you to work with us on a trial project for a week. We will pay you for this project. The idea is that you get to experience what it is like to work on our team, and we get a chance to experience what it would be like to have you as a colleague. Within that week, we will either make you an offer or let you know this is not a fit.

We keep this process to 2-3 weeks from when we get in touch with you.