Senior Data Scientist

Every day, millions of people search for their perfect flight, hotel or rental car on Skyscanner!  Our team is responsible for delivering data science solutions that power data-driven products across all these verticals and experimentation is a key part of this. Our in-house experimentation platform is a fundamental part of our future growth, creating the technology that enables Skyscanner to learn quickly and scale easily.

As a Data Scientist, you will join a multi-disciplinary team of other data scientists, data and software engineers to bring statistical rigour, research new methodologies and improve the experimentation culture at Skyscanner.  Any small improvement in this platform will affect any of the hundreds or thousands of A/B tests running at any given time and ultimately affects the quality of our traveller experience, so your contribution is pivotal in ensuring these are correctly designed, executed and analysed. 

You will have the opportunity to take ownership of the entire lifecycle of a data science project, from shaping the brief and exploring data to developing, evaluating, deploying, and monitoring solutions in a production environment. While the role is likely to focus initially on experimentation use cases, you will also have the opportunity to work on non-experimentation use cases with the goal of helping Skyscanner make better decisions.

The role will include:

• Develop our statistical tooling to support our in-house experimentation platform - how can I estimate the revenue impact of an experiment?
• Support on problems occurring in live experiments - there’s been a problem with the experiment allocation algorithm, can you still get a result from the experiment?
• Embed experimentation best practices – how to ensure anyone in Skyscanner can design and run experiments with multiple target metrics or conflicting experiment results?
• Research new methods for experimentation – how to scalably define Bayesian priors for any given metric?
• Create our internal experimentation teaching material – these can be videos in our Skyscanner university portal, help sections within the platform UI or even blogs!
• Balance tough priorities - how to satisfy both customer requirements and statistical rigour?
• Contributing to non-experimentation data science use cases - how can we predict customer value?

Some of our expectations for the role include:

• You are proficient in statistical hypothesis testing, experimentation design and analysis. Bonus points for non-standard experimentation scenarios or experience with Bayesian statistical testing.
• You have a solid foundation in causal inference methodology and how to identify causal effects. Bonus points for practical expertise on experimentation for non-user driven testing (marketing, quasi-experimentation and equivalent).
• You have some experience building and applying ML models to commercial use cases. Bonus points for experience deploying ML models into production
• You are comfortable working with large datasets and well versed in tools such as SQL, Python, R. Bonus points for Spark.
• You have a good understanding of software development tools (Git, PyCharm, Docker, CI/CD). Bonus points for cloud platforms (AWS or equivalent)
• You have familiarity with building data products. Bonus points for building packaged data science solutions
• You are a strong communicator and can explain sophisticated topics in simple terms.
• You have experience with proactively building relationships across organisational boundaries and with multiple stakeholders.
• You are passionate about the role of experimentation in helping a company’s potential as a data informed organisation, and as a community builder you take an active interest in developing others.

 What else can we offer you...

Skyscanner’s unwavering dedication to our travellers and partners remains as strong as ever. We’re confident that our travellers’ appetite to explore the world will return, and we are excited to navigate the new considerations of an evolving industry.

Already a global leader in travel, we want to elevate the way we work to a whole other level. In return, you’ll get meaningful things like medical insurance, health screenings, headspace subscriptions, a home office allowance and the option to buy more holiday. You’ll have the opportunity to work from any country for 4 weeks a year, and 30 days in our other global offices. You also have the option to take part in our extended annual leave which is an additional 3 weeks’ break (unpaid) after 3 years’ service and take 5 weeks’ break (paid) after 5 years’ service. Everything, in other words, to help you relax and give your best.