The Athletic is a digital sports media company that brings true sports fans closer to the athletes, teams and leagues that captivate their attention. We serve a multi-faceted audience that craves a richer connection and understanding with immersive storytelling and a like-minded community of fans. Founded in 2016 and with major operational hubs in San Francisco, Los Angeles, London and Melbourne, we empower a truly global team of more than 600 creators and cover more than 250 professional sports and collegiate teams across the United States, Canada and the UK. Our newsroom has produced thousands of in-depth reports along with more than 120 podcasts and other forms of premium content. Put simply, The Athletic is at the center of a sports fan’s universe.

We are looking for a senior data scientist who will bring and develop a deep understanding of our sportswriting, our in-game experience, and the way our subscribers use The Athletic to help us make our best-in-class product even better. In this role, you will work closely with our data, product, content programming, and engineering teams to develop advanced models that help us understand our business, optimize and automate our workflows, and help our product make smarter recommendations. As a member of our small data science team, your work will have a significant impact on all areas of data science at The Athletic, but your first project will involve using the latest NLP techniques to create new personalized product experiences for our users.

This role will be remote for candidates located in the US or Canada.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and implement mathematical models to drive key long-term product goals, like training a model that sorts our longform interviews into topics, or figuring out how to algorithmically condense a Sixers game into its most important moments.
• Lead projects with hands-on analysis and modeling, drawing from multiple analytical methods to choose the right tool and right level of complexity appropriate for the job.
• Use quantitative analysis to deeply understand what our users are saying, and to develop recommendations based on that analysis.
• Design and develop data science pipelines in production.
• Guide complex experiments.
• Cultivate an outstanding data science environment.

Requirements

• 4-6 years of experience as a data scientist with a proven ability to apply scientific methods to solve real-world problems on web scale data.
• Strong working knowledge of a scripting language like R or Python and how to use it to train machine learning models and put them into production.
• A broad understanding of SQL with an ability to efficiently pull and write to our data warehouses.
• Demonstrated experience with natural language processing machine learning methods and how to apply them to large amounts of text data.
• Knowledge of statistical principles and how they apply to predictive modeling.
• Ability to drive projects with minimal guidance and prioritize high-impact work.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills with ability to build cross-functional relationships.
• Can explain sophisticated concepts to diverse audiences and craft compelling stories with data.