The Director, Decision Sciences will build and lead a data science team focusing on state-of-the-art machine learning and natural language processing to create and enhance new technologies and products for Conversant’s digital marketing business.  This role reports to the Vice President of the Decision Sciences Personal Valuation team.

Conversant analyzes anonymized, privacy-safe data at internet scale: we handle 200B+ of online interactions a day and have $3.8 trillion in multichannel purchases in our database. The Decision Sciences group is a collaborative Research & Development team that continually enhances Conversant’s award-winning personalization platform through a combination of data science, machine learning, AI, natural language processing, recommender systems, computer science, and more. 

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Work with the business to understand requirements, and use your machine learning, natural language processing, and software development expertise to make strategic recommendations and develop an R&D roadmap.
• Lead key projects end-to-end from early stage research through development.
• Hire data scientists to build a highly impactful team.
• Develop an understanding of Conversant’s personalization platform and proprietary datasets.
• Design, implement, and validate solutions in Apache Spark, using Scala or Python in a distributed environment.
• Work with our Product and Engineering teams to integrate your solutions into Conversant’s platform.
• Participate fully in our collaborative approach to research and applications projects.
• Develop and manage talent by identifying the skills and performance criteria necessary for success and provide career-building opportunities for your team.
• Conceptualize analytic approaches and build out data sets, conduct experiments, and create models for testing and production.
• Measure success, provide feedback, and monitor launch effectiveness of new initiatives.

REQUIREMENTS

• Graduate degree, Ph.D. preferred, in Computer Science, Statistics, Linguistics, Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, Economics, Physics, or a related scientific discipline.
• Research experience and coursework in Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing.
• 2+ years managing projects as a technical project leader.
• 3+ years of programming experience in an industry environment.
• 3+ years in positions applying machine learning, natural language processing, data science, and analytics to business-critical decision processes.
• Prior management experience.
• Outstanding analytic and modeling skills, proficient at conceptualizing, implementing, and evaluating highly accurate and scalable solutions to business problems.
• Excellent organizational, motivational, and interpersonal skills; capable of interfacing well at multiple levels within a large organization.
• Demonstrated ability to develop and lead complex research and development projects.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills, and the ability to summarize technically complex information for a non-technical audience.
• Strong 'can do' attitude, with ability to thrive in a dynamic, fast paced environment with multiple simultaneous projects.
• Experience with distributed computing, such as Hadoop, Spark, or an MPP environment.
• Desire to work in a highly collaborative environment.

ADDITIONAL USEFUL BUT NOT REQUIRED SKILLS

• Experience with Computer Vision, Information Retrieval, Optimization, or Causal Inference.
• Experience with SQL, Scala, Python, or Java.