Senior Data Scientist

SENIOR DATA SCIENTIST ROLE

The Data Science Team is a small group of highly business-oriented Data Science professionals that use Big Data to generate break-through insights to deliver top- and bottom-line growth for the company. As part of the customer experience group, our focus is on loyalty, personalization, digital and services, but we operate throughout the business.

The team has a passion for understanding and driving customer behavior through a combination of big data, advanced statistics, cutting edge machine learning and experimentation.

We have built a powerful bespoke Data Science platform based on Databricks, Github and GCP cloud storage to allow us to quickly engineer new features, test POCs, build, optimize and validate models and then deploy them in production. We are early adopters of new features and several aspects of our platform have now been rolled out into the enterprise.

This is a broad-ranged role with regular access to senior leadership and with an opportunity for disproportionate impact to the business. The successful candidate will lead the data science platform side of the team, enabling the work of developing new AI/ML models, contributing to model development, optimization and productionization of our work as data products to be consumed by our strategic partners in the enterprise, and own the continuing development and maturity of the platform.

Reporting to a Data Science Team Lead, the Senior Data Scientist / ML Engineer will:

• Lead the operation and development of the PetSmart Data Science Platform to
  • establish best practices and drive continuous improvement in the data science infrastructure; data management; experimentation; CI/CD and workflow management; model maintenance, monitoring, calibration, retraining and iteration
  • transform insights and algorithms developed by data scientists into automated data products
  • further develop our capacity to build data products in an automated way
  • keep abreast of new developments and features, liaise with platform vendors on future requirements, test and integrate new platform features as they become available and presenting demos of our new capabilities to the team, stakeholders in IT and the business
• Own the Feature Store, with responsibility over
  • maintenance and ensuring updated runs are available to the AI / ML modeling team
  • ingestion and validation of new feature sets
  • maturity of the system
• Develop and Optimize AI / ML model performance through hyperparameter tuning for performance, model architecture development and efficient distributed code to process very large datasets. Establish best practice and communicate with the team and beyond
• Develop tools and libraries to facilitate the team and business beyond to make better use of our models and data products
• Drive growth in our digital business through development and deployment (in collaboration with engineering teams) of online machine learning models such as recommender engines and search optimization
• Work towards deepening the understanding of our customers and improving the maturity of personalization at PetSmart through the iterative development of segmentation, customer journey and recommender models across a variety of channels including digital, email, direct mail and in-store
• Provide guidance and mentorship to less experienced members of the team

CANDIDATE PROFILE

• Quantitative background and technical skillset with a proven track record of success in data science
• Strategic thinker, deeply curious and passionate about leveraging Big Data and Data Science to answer complex business questions
• Ability to work collaboratively and constructively with leaders and team members across the business to build tools to support execution and delivery against analytical projects
• Flexible mindset and ability to contribute to multiple work streams with fluid and evolving prioritization
• A self-starter with the ability to manage own workflow
• Strong communication skills, with a focus on presenting complex or highly technical concepts in ways that make them easily understood by team members, leaders and non-technical experts
• Willingness to lead a small team of ML engineers in future

CANDIDATE EDUCATIONAL AND PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

QUALIFICATIONS AND SKILLS

• Must have very strong programming experience with Python (Object oriented programming, unit / integration testing, package development), and good knowledge of R and/or SQL
• Experience using Spark for large scale data processing tasks / Big Data Analytics, ideally in a Databricks environment
• Experience with cloud architecture, ideally GCP
• Must have knowledge with several of these methodologies, and demonstrate experience of bringing them into production:
  • Feature Engineering: Writing efficient, parametrized, robust, and readable code to perform complex ETL jobs
  • Building data science pipelines from raw data to final output
  • Productionizing model scoring (scheduled/orchestrated jobs and/or live scoring engines)
  • Supervised Learning: Multiple regression, bagging and boosting methods for classification, lasso/ridge/elastic nets, logistic regression,
  • Model validation and hyperparameter optimization
  • Recommendation engines: Matrix factorization, collaborative filtering, cold start problems
  • Other Concepts: Neural network models Reinforcement Learning / Multi-arm bandits, Customer Lifetime Value, Natural Language Processing, Market basket analysis, clustering and segmentation, missing data imputation, graph network analysis
• Must have experience of the following software engineering methods:
  • Data Science toolkits (Pandas, Scikit-learn, Keras, Tensorflow, SparkML etc.)
  • Version control (Git / Github)
  • Relational databases and SQL programming
  • Workflow or model management (e.g. MLFlow, CI/CD platforms such as GitlabCI, Jenkins etc.)
• Must be excited to research and learn new techniques to augment current tools and methodologies
• Experience in recruiting and leading technical teams is a bonus

EDUCATION AND EXPERIENCE

• Masters degree in Data Science / Big data engineering, or another quantitative field or proven equivalent industry experience

• Five or more (5+) years of professional experience in a data science, analytical or big data infrastructure / engineering role
• Experience performing data science and/or analytics in a retail setting is ideal

Our home office offers outstanding amenities in a fun and rewarding workplace including:

• Pet friendly environment, bring your pets to work!
• A work-life balance and family events such as movie nights, art events and holiday festivals
• “Top Dog” gym with equipment, fitness classes, massage therapists and personal trainers
• “Sit & Stay” Café serving fresh breakfast and lunch options
• Starbucks cart—productivity at its finest!
• “Lil’ Paws” learning center and onsite daycare facility
• Volunteer events with PetSmart Charities
• Learn more about #LifeAtPetSmart here: https://www.lifeatpetsmart.com/life-at-petsmart/
• Check out Associate stories and share in some celebrations at PetSmart: https://www.blog.lifeatpetsmart.com/
• Explore PetSmart Benefits here: https://benefits.petsmart.com/