The Role: 

The Lead Data Scientist, in collaboration with product and engineering leads, will lead the Search team in formulating a roadmap and data science strategy to improve Newsela’s search service. Using signals from our users and text, you’ll also work to improve the ranking algorithms to boost the search experience and relevant content for users. You’ll determine the best metrics to measure the accuracy and effectiveness of our models, and will lead the team in effectively testing solutions that improve performance against those metrics. Reporting to the Director of Data Science, you’ll  help ensure practical modeling of data to optimize development speed and will break down the roadmap into sprints delegated across the team. You’ll ensure that team process is moving smoothly, and will mentor the team to use best practices of foundational machine learning.

Why You’ll Love This Role: 

You’ll be working in depth on search engine problems, with a focus on improving search relevance. As a leader on the Search team, you’ll have influence on the roadmap for search strategy and will play a key role in encouraging thought leadership and machine learning best practices. You’ll also have the opportunity to collaborate and share ideas with our recommendations team. You’ll also have the opportunity to build the Newsela search engine from the ground up. Your work will directly impact the ability of teachers nationwide as they search for content to buid their lesson plans.

Why We’ll Love You:

You have 5+ years of practical machine learning experience in industry, and have worked on search engines, content ranking systems, and/or recommendations. You are fluent in SQL and Python (or other scripting languages), and are comfortable with git and Linux environments. You understand th ecomplexities of building out live machine learning pipelines in production, have experience choosing appropriate metrics to understand effects fo your product, and understand tradeoffs of modeling decisions. You prefer deploying practical solutions to test rather than researching theoretical ideas without live data. As a leader, you can delegate important work, set expectations and success criteria for products, and coach teammates to achieve timely and successful results. You’re a product-minded individual who orients toward user impact rather than dwelling on complex algorithms. You’re comfortable collaborating across product and engineering teams, and you encourage strong testing methodologies, a have keen eye for finding issues before deployment, and push for monitoring results. You also ensure that the team uses data to drive product decisions.

 About Newsela:

One of the fastest growing tech companies in K-12 education, Newsela was founded on the principle that while every child may have unique learning preferences, they all deserve a rich learning experience that ignites a love of learning. We built our platform based on learning science research to deliver the most engaging, authentic content to modernize how teaching happens in the classroom. Along with interactive assessments and tools, we provide teachers with digital content at five reading levels -- from +100 of the best sources -- that is relevant to the diverse backgrounds and interests of their students. Since we started in 2013, we’ve established a presence in 90% of U.S. K-12 schools and over 2.5M teachers and 37M students have registered with Newsela.