So You Want to be a Data Scientist…?

Just a quick post to remark on a coincidence of job ads I’ve spotted over the last couple of weeks:

• Linked In – Senior Data Scientist: The Senior Data Scientist will play a leadership role on a focused existing team consisting of data scientists and business leadership to work on a series of high-value activities:

  1) Build predictive models to help the Hiring Solutions sales & marketing leadership team with expansion planning, account allocations and prioritization. Use machine learning techniques to optimize over time
  2) Create self-serve reports and dashboards for our leadership team, marketing personnel, and sales executives to better understand our overall business, as well as specific opportunities
  3) Provide customized analysis to help us work with our most valuable prospects and customers, including building some of our reporting capabilities to share with our thousands of customers
  4) Above all else, drive and enable our team to take fullest advantage of our valuable & quickly expanding proprietary data set

• Last.fm – Data Scientist: We’re seeking a top notch data scientist with strong programming skills to join the small and very enthusiastic data and recommendations team at Last.fm. This is a full-time position, based in London.

  Are you a superb data analyst as well as a hands-on implementer that understands the trade-offs of the memory hierarchy and is able to work around constraints in disk speed, memory size and CPU cycles? Are you familiar with all common data structures and their complexity? Do you take pride in being clever and solving difficult problems creatively? Are you full of ideas and always looking for new ways of making use out of data? Are you an advocate for data-driven development and fully capable of conducting a proper A/B test? Do you love music?

  We need a motivated data hero to explore and learn from our rich datasets, build data-related services and infrastructure, conduct data-driven evaluations and experiments, improve our recommendations and other data-based products, and show off on http://playground.last.fm.

• Foursquare: Data Scientist: We are just starting to ramp-up our data science and analytics team and are looking for talented individuals to help us with projects ranging across the full spectrum of Machine Learning and Statistical Programming disciplines. We are aggressively building out predictive systems and methods for improving our data quality and improving our core algorithms. We are specifically interested in people with experience with prediction or recommender systems, search and ranking algorithms, and classification algorithms.

  Our ideal candidate will be comfortable in a fluid start-up environment and will bring an energetic, fun and creative approach to their work. You have experience building real products in the real world from the ground up or extensive research experience dealing with large datasets. Your teammates see you as a rock star, and go to you with their toughest problems. You’re comfortable jumping in the deep end, learning new skills on a bleeding edge platform, and pushing out tons of high quality work fast.

• Aviagen Ltd: Analytical Data Scientist: We are seeking an outstanding Analytical Data Scientist, reporting to the Global Head of Technical Systems, to develop and apply statistical and optimization techniques to internal and external production databases to identify trends in performance, opportunities for improvement and formulate best practice advice. You will also contribute to the development of software tools to enhance product technical support.

Give it a year and I reckon we’ll be seeing an increasing number of these, as well as bleeding edge ads for “visualisation engineers” or “data visualisation analysts”…such as this one:

Senior Visualisation Engineer
Fantastic opportunity to join and organisation that has a 1b Turnover and over 140 offices globally.
You will be working specifically on Transportation projects a taking a lead role in visualisation project work to include developing business both internally and externally, supervision of junior staff and some direct technical work creating visualisation

Or maybe it was always thus…? Time to start tracking things on IT Jobs Watch, maybe?