About Ancestry:

When you join Ancestry, you join a human-centered company where every person’s story is important. We believe that by discovering the struggles and triumphs of our past, we can foster deeper bonds and more meaningful connections among families and communities. Our talented team of scientists, engineers, genealogists, historians, and storytellers is dedicated to empowering customers around the world from all backgrounds on their journeys of personal discovery.

With more than 30+ billion digitized global historical records, 100+ million family trees, and 20+ million people in our growing AncestryDNA database, Ancestry helps customers discover their family story and gain a new level of understanding about their lives. Passionate about dedicating your work to enriching people’s lives? You belong at Ancestry.

We are looking for a Staff Data Scientist with expertise in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) to join our centralized Data Science team and report to the CV/NLP Manager. You will develop state of the art solutions to a variety of challenging problems supporting family history and DNA products.

What you'll do...

In partnership with business leaders, establish a vision for the use of NLP to extract value and data-driven insights from our billions of genealogical records and from the Newspapers.com archives;

Use data science and machine learning to drive product improvement, customer success, marketing optimization, and more across both our family history and DNA products;

Help champion a data-driven culture and push long-term business value creation through development of best-in-class data science and NLP capabilities;

Partner with subject matter experts to inject their in-depth knowledge into the model creation process

Work closely with engineering teams to optimize NLP algorithms and deep learning models, deliver model improvements, and deploy models to run efficiently in production systems;

What you have...

Ph.D. in Computer Science, Statistics, Mathematics, Linguistics, Engineering or data related field;

Minimum5+ years of hands-on technical experience developing and deploying NLP deep learning and machine learning models in production settings;

Minimum 2+ years of experience mentoring and leading engineering teams;

Direct industrial experience with a proven track record of leading efforts to design, implement, and deploy multiple data science projects end-to-end from idea generation, objectives formulation, to implementation and deliverables;

Extensive background in ML and NLP methods including CNN, RNN, transfer learning, attention mechanisms, large language models, transformers, generative models and embedding methods;

Experience with NLP techniques such as named entity extraction, document classification, document summarization, topic modeling, relationship extraction, machine translation, sentiment analysis, dialogue systems;

Expertise with NLP technologies including Python, Tensorflow, PyTorch, Keras, SciPy stack and Scikit-learn, NLTK, spaCy, pandas, numpy, etc.

Knowledge of pre-trained language models like BERT, GPT, T5, Huggingface and XLNet

Additional Information:

Ancestry is an Equal Opportunity Employer that makes employment decisions without regard to race, color, religious creed, national origin, ancestry, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, age, mental or physical disability, medical condition, military or veteran status, citizenship, marital status, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. In addition, Ancestry will provide reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities.

All job offers are contingent on a background check screen that complies with applicable law.  For San Francisco office candidates, pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, Ancestry will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

Ancestry is not accepting unsolicited assistance from search firms for this employment opportunity. All resumes submitted by search firms to any employee at Ancestry via-email, the Internet or in any form and/or method without a valid written search agreement in place for this position will be deemed the sole property of Ancestry. No fee will be paid in the event the candidate is hired by Ancestry as a result of the referral or through other means.