Manager of Data Science 1236 views

Meet CarGurus—the #1 visited online car shopping website in the US. At CarGurus, they’re building the world’s most trusted and transparent automotive marketplace where it’s easy to find great deals from top-rated dealers.

Founded in 2006 by Langley Steinert (co-founder of TripAdvisor), CarGurus is a technology company with a passion for data and its power to simplify every aspect of the car shopping experience. Using proprietary technology, search algorithms and innovative data analytics, they provide unbiased validation on pricing, dealer reputation and vehicle history.

The goal of their Data Science team is to provide data scientific solutions that serve all of CarGurus by creating new products and elevating existing components of the car marketplace. These solutions range from optimizing their online advertising efforts to improving customers’ car-shopping experiences. They are looking for a Manager of Data Science who can continue to grow their team’s ability to turn data into successful products.

What You’ll Do

• • Lead the growing Data Science team at CarGurus
  • Invest in the professional and intellectual growth of your team and yourself
  • Assess the business impact and success likelihood of potential ML approaches
  • Collaborate with data engineers who will implement the team’s solutions in production
  • Communicate data scientific solutions to both technical and business stakeholders
  • Provide technical guidance on projects for each subordinate
  • Provide professional and intellectual mentorship for Data Science team members
  • Foster an inclusive, transparent, and collaborative culture for data science at CarGurus
  • Cultivate an environment of respect and trust

Example Projects

• • Estimate the long-term conversion rate of hundreds of millions of keywords, thousands of demographics indicators, and other forms of targeting
  • Analyze millions of searches entered online to find new keywords for bidding opportunities
  • For any given monthly spend target and measure of efficiency (e.g., CPL, ROI), estimate the efficiency metric which will result in the target spend
  • Measure the impact of television, radio and online advertising using modern causal inference techniques
  • Design multi-factor randomized experiments to compare multiple strategies or algorithms
  • Build real-time recommendation engines based on users’ shopping behavior

Who You Are

• You have:

• At least five years of experience turning data into successful products that have been pushed to production
• At least two years of experience leading a data science team
• At least two years of experience using Python for data science (e.g. pandas, numpy, scikit-learn, pytorch, tensorflow, keras)
• An advanced degree (or equivalent experience) in one of the following: statistics, computer science (ideally with a focus on machine learning) or any quantitative field which makes use of advanced statistical or machine learning techniques
• A breadth of knowledge in statistics and machine learning (e.g. supervised learning, unsupervised learning, optimization, recommendation systems, NLP, computer vision, hypothesis testing, regression theory, matrix theory)
• A solid understanding of the theoretical foundations of statistics and machine learning
• An ability to map business objectives to clear data scientific goals and metrics
• An interest in generating data science project ideas that are impactful for the business
• A focus on fostering data science as a generalist R&D organization at CarGurus
• The ability to communicate effectively and succinctly with people of varying techincal ability

• Bonus Points if you have:

• Experience leading data science for a company or a department
• Experience with SQL or Spark
• A very strong theory background (i.e. good at formalizing questions, ideas, and metrics into mathematical statements)
• Publications in major academic conferences/journals (JMLR, NIPS, ICML, KDD, JASA, AOS, etc)

CarGurus Culture

At the core of their company culture is a spirit of innovation, curiosity and collaboration. True to their start-up roots, they’re nimble, flexible and hardworking. They have a great respect for testing and learning and a healthy aversion to scheduling meetings to discuss meetings. Lunch is catered daily. Gym membership is free. Foosball and ping pong are played often. Now a publicly-traded company, they’re as committed as ever to cultivating the culture that got them here.

In addition to the US, CarGurus operates sites in Canada, the UK and Germany with other markets on the horizon. Their offices are located in Cambridge, MA, Detroit, MI and Dublin, Ireland. If you’d like to learn more, please visit their careers page.