As the Director of Data Science you will be responsible for gathering and organizing large amounts of user, performance, and behavioral data to inform the strategy and plans of the Marketing & Communications Team. You will work directly with other members of our Marketing, Communications & digital teams to collect data from multiple sources, including web APIs and internal databases encoded in SQL. This role will involve finding innovative ways to combine fields of data that don’t naturally mesh together. The ideal candidate is adept at using data to identify opportunities for audience & process optimization by modeling different courses of action to predict effectiveness. You must have experience using multiple data mining/data analysis methods, working with data tools, building & implementing models, using/creating algorithms, and creating/running simulations. The right candidate will be skilled at creating meaningful data visualizations that communicate your findings and connect them to the expected business impact.
In this role you will be influential in helping Teach For America achieve its powerful mission to transform society through educational reform. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity to be at the heart of a strategic shift in how a large, complex not-for-profit communicates in digital channels, & you will be empowered to make decisions & build capabilities that draw on your professional expertise.
- Identify opportunities for leveraging data to drive business outcomes
- Mine & analyze data from web APIs and databases to drive optimization & improvement of marketing techniques & business strategies
- Assess the effectiveness & accuracy of new data sources & data gathering techniques
- Develop custom data models & algorithms to apply to data sets
- Use modeling to increase & optimize constituent experiences, traffic generation, ad targeting & other business outcomes
- Develop Insights team testing framework & test model quality
- Build data visualizations that express the story of your data to business stakeholders
- 5+ years of experience manipulating data sets & building statistical models
- Experience creating & using advanced machine learning algorithms & statistics: regression, simulation, scenario analysis, modeling, clustering, decision trees, neural networks, etc.
- Experience using web services: Redshift, S3, Spark, DigitalOcean, Google Big Query, etc.
- Experience using statistical computer languages (R, Python, SLQ, etc.) to manipulate data & draw insights from large data sets (e.g. the averages of NBA player performance in a dataset that compares NBA game statistics with player salaries)
Work Demands
- National travel for in-person meetings approximately once per quarter; some weekend and evening work expected
Skills
- Knowledge of a variety of machine learning techniques (clustering, decision tree learning, artificial neural networks, etc.) & their real-world advantages/drawbacks
- Knowledge & experience in statistical & data mining techniques: GLM/Regression, Random Forest, Boosting, Trees, text mining, social network analysis, etc.
- Excellent written & verbal communication skills for coordinating across teams
- Passionate about educational equity as well as a demonstrated commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusiveness
- A strong strategic, critical thinker, and problem solver
- Exceptional at managing multiple projects with a keen eye to detail and data accuracy
- Skilled in the art of persuasion, with a deep sense of humility and openness to the perspectives of others
- Able to maintain a sense of possibility in the face of obstacles, and balance both short- and long-term results