About the job 

We’re looking for a business-minded data master to join our team as a Data Scientist to drive data-centric product development and growth in collaboration with our high-performing team of Product Managers, and Software Engineers on the Customer Experience Product team. 

You will work closely with the team to build and deploy highly performant dynamic pricing models to personalize customer experience products to optimize for conversion rates and overall revenue. You will drive experiments and launch challenger models to test hypotheses and continually improve upon key business metrics. Hopper’s large user base often means that we can get statistically significant results within a short period of time post-launch, making this a dynamic role for a results-driven data scientist. 

You may be a great fit for our team if you’re a curious self-starter who thrives in ambiguity, is passionate about exploring the intersection of real business problems with huge (and often messy) data sets, and finding effective ways to simplify and focus on practical opportunities to deliver significant value to our customers. 

Minimum Qualifications

• A degree in Math, Statistics, Computer Science, Engineering or other quantitative disciplines
• Extremely strong analytical and problem-solving skills
• Proven ability to communicate complex technical work to non-technical audiences
• A strong passion for and extensive experience conducting empirical research and answering hard questions with data
• A self starter mentality and the ability to thrive in uncertainty
• Experience with relational databases and using SQL to pull and analyze data
• Experience in Pandas, R, SAS or other tools appropriate for data preparation and analysis
• Experience with statistical modeling tools and underlying algorithms
• Experience with business reporting tools such as Tableau, Amplitude
• Proficiency with Unix/Linux environments

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with revenue management models in travel a plus
• Ability to break down complex business problems down to the data drivers
• Strong ability to communicate models and insights to stakeholders
• Comfortable collaborating with engineering to identify and own data science implementations in production
• Able to design, create and measure consumer facing experiments 
• Able to provide thought leadership on pricing and revenue management models
• Able to create ETL pipelines and/or support engineering in the creation of ETL pipelines

Responsibilities

• Frame and conduct complex exploratory analyses needed to deepen our understanding of Hopper users and what drives them to conversion and retention 
• Create and deploy powerful dynamic pricing models that power Customer Experience product merchandising on the Hopper app 
• Have ownership of the full data science lifecycle, including partnering with product, engineering and operations teams to deliver highly customer focused products. 
• Use machine learning and big data tools on large and complex data sets to enhance our data-driven, personalized travel advice
• Create advanced dashboards for product experiment tracking and business unit performance analysis using Amplitude, Tableau and BigQuery/Google sheets
• Find effective ways to simplify and communicate analyses to a non-technical audience

Benefits

• Well-funded and proven startup with large ambitions, competitive salary and stock options
• Unlimited PTO
• WeWork All Access Pass OR Work-from-home stipend
• Entrepreneurial culture where pushing limits and taking risks is everyday business
• Open communication with management and company leadership
• Small, dynamic teams = massive impact
• 100% employer-paid telemedicine, medical, dental, vision, disability and life insurance plans
• Access to a Retirement Savings Plan

Despite the pandemic’s impact on the travel industry, Hopper has emerged stronger than ever. As the travel industry continues to rebound, Hopper has seen its valuation more than double since early 2020, reflecting the strength of our mobile-only marketplace and the value customers are deriving from our proprietary suite of fintech offerings. 

Here are just a few stats that demonstrate our recent growth:

- Hopper’s valuation is now over $3.5B, reflecting the strength of its mobile-only marketplace and value customers are deriving from the company’s proprietary suite of fintech offerings.

- Based on its current run rate, Hopper is pacing towards 330% revenue growth compared to last year, and it has already surpassed its pre-pandemic revenue peak from Q1 2020 by over 100%.

- Hopper has over 60 million downloads, consistently ranks as one of the most downloaded travel apps, and now has a larger air travel market share in North America than it did before the pandemic (source: MIDT). 

- The company is on track to surpass $1.5 billion in travel sales this year, with 40% coming from the hotel and car rental categories. 

- Hopper’s fintech offerings, such as Price Freeze and Rebooking Guarantee, now represent 50% of its revenue. 

- Given the success of its travel fintech, Hopper recently launched a B2B initiative called Hopper Cloud, where any travel provider can unlock a totally unique revenue stream by seamlessly integrating and offering Hopper’s travel fintech.

 

The industry opportunity for Hopper Cloud is enormous as projections estimate that if all travel distribution channels offered travel fintech, it could increase the total consumer spend for the sector by $200 billion annually.

All this recent growth is just the beginning. There are still so many new opportunities we’re excited to tackle in the next year!