Lead Data Scientist - CTV Advertising

Philo: TV on the Internet (TVoIP)

At Philo, we’re a group of technology and product people who set out to build the future of television, marrying the best in modern technology with the most compelling medium ever invented — in short, we’re building the TV experience that we’ve always wanted for ourselves. In practice this means leveraging cloud delivery, modern tech stacks, machine learning, and hand-crafted native app experiences on all of our platforms. We aim to deliver a rock solid experience on the streaming basics, while cooking up next generation multi-screen and multi-user playback experiences.

Data Science at Philo

Data underpins everything we do at Philo: making informed business decisions; analyzing and improving the quality of our streaming experience; running product experiments to optimize our signup flows; and making it easier for our users to find the perfect thing to watch. On the Data Science team, we’re looking for someone who is comfortable working on a variety of ad auction and placement optimization problems, using experimentation to improve our ads systems, and helping to lead our team in balancing monetization and quality of experience considerations across our streaming service. You’ll be working closely with other data scientists, analysts, and engineers to build and deploy solutions directly for our service. 

We are passionate about problem-solving and providing data-informed insights for the entire company using both cutting-edge techniques and proven practices in close collaboration with every department. To complete our work we build on modern open-source tools including dbt, GrowthBook, Robyn, Superset, and PyTorch as well as SaaS tools such as Segment, SageMaker, AWS Glue, Mode, Avo, and BigEye.

Some of the recent projects our Data Science team members have worked on include:

• Modeling to determine which early product behaviors predict conversion
• Running experiments to evaluate the impact of alternative ad bidding strategies
• Building data models for analysis of lifetime value of customers including ad revenue
• Price sensitivity research and competitive market analyses

Qualifications

Philo is seeking a Senior Advertising Data Scientist with demonstrated understanding of statistical modeling, A/B/n experimentation practices, SQL, and experience independently developing data driven insights. This data scientist will have the opportunity to leverage massive structured, unstructured, transactional, and real-time data sets from a variety of sources, analyze financial and customer usage patterns, and make actionable recommendations to product, marketing, engineering, and business development teams. 

In this role, the Senior Advertising Data Scientist will support the entire product development lifecycle for our programmatic sales side advertising systems (that is, the ad inventory we sell), from feature ideation and opportunity sizing to measurement and experiment design and from causal analysis and post-launch learning to the next development cycle. Senior Data Scientists at Philo contribute to mentorship and leadership on the Data team whether they are people managers or individual contributors. The individual in this role will be expected to balance individual contribution (~80% of time) with people management responsibilities.

Responsibilities:

• Build a deep understanding of how subscribers use Philo on each of our streaming platforms, how that usage influences advertising performance and defining the metrics to evaluate new features in our advertising systems
• Own analytics and tracking plans within several development work streams, from metric definition and data instrumentation design to ongoing reporting and research
• Iteratively improve our experimentation methods and establish best practices for experiments in a live advertising auction environment
• Establish curated dashboards that will serve as the primary source by which we evaluate the performance of features
• Run queries to support ad-hoc product questions and create Mode dashboards and other visualizations for stakeholders
• Own your analytics projects, proactively identify issues and opportunities, test hypotheses, and propose solutions
• Collaborate with groups company-wide (e.g. business development, advertising operations, marketing, and support) on KPIs, including lifetime value, retention, win-back, and content consumption metrics

Key Qualifications:

• 10+ years of experience in a Data Science role, preferably with experience managing analysts, engineers, or data scientists. Demonstrated ability to influence product roadmaps and business decisions with data
• Proven expertise in experimental design (including but not limited to A/B testing), principles of causal inference, and statistical techniques
  Experience with programmatic DSP/SSP advertising systems
• Experience with relational databases and SQL
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to explain and present analytical methodology and results to non-technical audiences
• Expert with statistical analysis in either R or Python
• Strong analytics fundamentals – a degree in statistics, economics, a related field, or similar professional experience
• Experience in writing production-quality code in R/Python, productionizing data models and statistical models with tools such as Git, Sagemaker, and dbt, and using software engineering best practices around version control, review, and automated testing

More about Philo

At Philo, we’re a company that puts people first—both our subscribers and our team. Our philosophy is to empower our colleagues to do their best work while supporting each other in pursuing shared goals. We value pragmatism, pride in our work, and passion. Transparency and openness are fundamental to our company culture. We are committed to diversity and inclusion as we grow the Philo team and shape the future of TV. We believe that a diverse set of voices and perspectives on our team enables us to innovate faster and create the best experience for our subscribers.

Philo offers access to top-rated networks, including AMC, BET, CMT, Comedy Central, Discovery, Food Network, Hallmark, HGTV, History, Investigation Discovery, Lifetime, MTV, Nickelodeon, OWN, VH1, WE tv, and more, along with groundbreaking originals and blockbuster movies included with AMC+. Our service also includes 80+ free channels and premium add-ons like STARZ and MGM+.

Our extensive library boasts over 75,000 titles, and our unlimited DVR allows users to save their favorite shows and movies for up to a year, skipping ads for a seamless viewing experience. Stream on up to three devices simultaneously, whether on your phone, tablet, laptop, or TV using Roku, Apple TV, Fire TV, Samsung TV, Android TV, Vizio TV, or Chromecast.

Philo is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in New York and Cambridge, MA. Our leadership team includes a co-founder of Facebook and alums from Meraki and HBO, backed by NEA and industry partners like Discovery, Viacom, AMC, and A&E.

Join us at Philo and be part of a team that's shaping the future of TV!

Status: Full-time
Location: San Francisco, CA 
Compensation: Includes annual salary between $180K-$230K depending on experience and location, company stock options, and health benefits.

We value a diverse and inclusive workplace and we welcome people of different backgrounds, experiences, skills, and perspectives. Philo is an equal opportunity employer. We believe that everyone does their best work when they are supported by each other and the company, and we offer a generous set of benefits to make sure the Philo team is happy and healthy. Here is a sampling of the benefits we offer our team:

• Full health, dental and vision coverage for you and your family
• 401(k) plan with employer contributions (we match 100% of deferrals up to 3% of pay and 50% of the next 2% of pay)
• Flexible working hours
• Up to 20 weeks of fully paid parental leave
• Unlimited paid time off for vacation and sick leave
• $2,000 annual vacation bonus (we pay you to take a two week vacation)
• $5,250 annually for professional development and educational assistance
• $1,250 annual home office + TV stipend during first year of employment ($250 annually thereafter)
• $500/month ($6,000/year) bonus for employees who commit to working at least 3 days per week in our offices, plus generous commuter benefits ($315/month towards transit, rideshare, bike rental, or parking at our HQ office in San Francisco)
• Free Gympass subscription — an all-in-one corporate benefit that gives employees the largest selection of gyms, studios, classes, training and wellness apps
• Dog-friendly office
• And much more!

For California Residents: Philo’s CCPA Notice at Collection – Employees, Applicants, Owners, Directors, Officers and Contractors

Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.