Namely’s mission is to help mid-sized companies build a better workplace. We’re an HR, payroll, and benefits platform that provides the technology, data, and support that HR professionals need and employees love to use. People are at the center of everything we do, and we believe every company and employee deserves a great workplace, supported by innovative HR technology. At Namely, we are problem solvers, self-starters, and obsessed with creating the best experience for our clients.

Namely is seeking a (Type B) Principal Data Scientist to join our growing Data team in New York City. Our primary focus is to hire smart and motivated engineers that are eager to continue growing, mentoring, and driving big projects forward. Namely has a lot of interesting analytics problems to solve and build into our technology offerings.

Given that we have an HR, Payroll, and Benefits platform, we do not have Big Data problems to solve. What we do have is droves of high quality and structured data, as well as, unstructured text, from which we help our clients gain strategic knowledge and insight into their workforce. Our hiring process is language agnostic, we use a diverse set of tools and languages such as Spark, RDBMS, Kafka, Scala, Python, SQL, R, and more.

We’ve built a strong Data team to date, but have a lot of work ahead of us, including:

• Identify and productize analyses and models to help our clients build a stronger workforce.
• Identify and productize bellwethers to help our clients build a stronger workforce.
• Identify and productize impactful benchmarks to help our clients compare their workforce to their industry, geography, or other types of groupings.
• Build a strong Data Science team to collaborate with our Product and Business Development partners on strategic product features for Namely.
• Leveling up our Data platform, to be first in class for complex analytics experiments.

Help us scale our business to meet the needs of our growing customer base and develop strategic data products on the Namely platform. You'll be a critical part of our growing company, working on a cross-functional team to implement best practices in strategic knowledge and insight for our clients. You’ll have the chance to work in an open and collaborative environment, receive and give hands-on mentorship and have opportunities to grow and accelerate your career.

Responsibilities:

• Develop comprehensive understanding of Namely data, advocating for changes where needed for the Namely product.
• Solve difficult, non-routine analysis problems, applying advanced analytical methods as needed. Conduct end-to-end analysis that includes data gathering and requirements specification, processing, analysis, ongoing deliverables, and presentations.
• Research, design and prototype robust and scalable models based on machine learning, data mining, and statistical modeling to productionalize key product features on the Namely platform.
• Interact cross-functionally with a wide variety of people and teams. Work closely with Engineering, Product, and Business Development to identify new analytics models for the Namely platform, as well as, to ensure these models can be implemented as part of a delivered solution replicable across most Namely clients.
• Keep abreast of the latest developments in the field by continuous learning and proactively champion promising new methods, tools, and studies relevant to the problems at hand.
• Lead by example and produce high-quality analysis and code that establishes analytics standards and best practices for the entire organization.
• Be responsible for mentoring a highly skilled set of data engineers and analysts at all levels.
• Effectively communicate technical and business risks to stakeholders to ensure that the most informed decisions are being made.
• Play a critical role in planning, working closely with senior leaders to develop plans, resource requirements, and influence our long-term technical and business strategy.

Desired Experience:

• MS degree in a quantitative discipline (e.g., statistics, operations research, bioinformatics, economics, computational biology, computer science, mathematics, physics, electrical engineering, industrial engineering).
• 10+ years of relevant work experience (e.g., as a data scientist, statistician, computational physicist, computational biologist), including deep expertise and experience with statistical data analysis such as linear models, multivariate analysis, and stochastic models.
• Extensive experience articulating hypotheses and using mathematical techniques to arrive at an answer using available data. Experience translating analysis results into actionable recommendations.
• Applied experience with graph analysis.
• Applied experience with natural language processing.
• Demonstrated skills in selecting the right statistical tools given a data analysis problem.
• Demonstrated leadership and self-direction. Demonstrated willingness to both teach others and learn new techniques.
• Experience with statistical software (e.g., R, Python, MATLAB, pandas).
• Proficient in at least two programming languages, e.g., Python and Scala.
• Experience with database languages (e.g., SQL).
• Strong verbal and written communication skills. You’ll need to create consensus among passionate stakeholders in a dynamic, fast-paced environment.

Nice-to-Have’s:

• Experience with machine learning frameworks (e.g., tensorflow, PyTorch, Keras)
• Experience with Big Data platforms (e.g., Spark)

About Namely

Namely was founded in 2012 to create an HR platform as intuitive as social media, but powerful enough to support the complexity of today’s workforce. Our belief is that great companies are built on a great employee experience, which is why we created the first HR platform employees love to use. In fact, unlike most traditional HR software, 78% of our clients’ employees log in to Namely at least once per month! Namely is backed by some amazing VCs including Sequoia, and serves companies in just about every industry and state nationwide. We love mid-sized companies because they’re mission-driven, client-obsessed, and care deeply about their employees... just like us. We believe in giving you the tools you need to do the best work of your career, and we’re just getting started.

We invite you to fill out the EEO survey below as part of our ongoing diversity initiatives at Namely. Your participation in the survey is completely optional and voluntary, and none of the information you provide will be considered in the hiring process or with respect to any employment decision made by Namely. Namely will have access only to anonymized data submitted through these surveys.