ROLE OVERVIEW

Croud is a digital marketing agency with a unique business model, recently named Campaign's Global Performance Marketing Agency of the Year. 

We are recruiting for a Senior Data Scientist to work in the context of digital advertising and marketing. 

We are investing in Data Solutions as a strategic priority. The team brings together a number of capabilities that sit within different parts of Croud, into one unit that will drive cutting edge development in a number of critical areas for the business.

The role sits in the newly created Data Science & Tools team within this department, reporting to Head of Data Science & Tools. The team’s remit is to drive innovation & revenue in two ways: develop & deliver revenue-driving/client-facing data science solutions and internal tools used within the agency.  

The right hire will share Croud’s values:

• Passion: loving what you do and being driven to excel with each new project
• Imagination: meeting challenges creatively and ready to try new ideas
• Integrity: accountable and always excellent to one another

Croud operates a hybrid working model with a minimum of 2 days a week based in our London office and the remaining days from home if you wish.

RESPONSIBILITIES

The purpose of the role is to lead the data science squad within Croud (currently Data Scientist plus two grad level roles), and oversee the delivery of client projects and development of production-level media activation and effectiveness solutions.

The successful candidate is expected to be very hands-on in coding, and provide technical coaching for the wider team, plus other contracted staff / freelancers to ensure work is delivered to brief, in time and to the standard required.

There’re in general three areas of work:

• Management:
  • Technical coaching and development of more junior members of the team, including e.g. statistical modelling/machine learning algorithms, hands-on coding support, cloud-based data science workflow & architecture
  • Line management responsibilities and general team development
• Project work:
  • Deliver / oversee client projects to brief, in time and to the standard required
  • Project examples include: lead scoring (or propensity to convert model), media mix modelling, experimental studies
  • See also the tasks listed under ‘productionise solutions’ as they’re very likely to be applicable here
• Development:
  • Develop new solutions from scratch:
    • This could be new project ideas that have been sold to clients (but have yet to be delivered), or even brand new territories that the company has yet to venture into.
  • Productionise solutions:
    • For some of the existing solutions (or even project ideas that have been sold to clients) that we anticipate strong client interests, the successful candidate will work with the wider team to productionise them, including:
      • Enhancing the codebase in such a way that is easily reusable in future projects, with minimal level of human input required
      • Improving / innovating the modelling approach and / or codebase itself to enhance e.g. speed & quality & use of computation resources (so a more cost-effective codebase)
      • Embedding version-control, code review, documentation in the development process
      • Engineering the solution on GCP (with the support of Senior Data Engineer)
      • Supporting more junior members in the company / external resources to deliver the productionised solutions
      • Logging, debugging & maintenance
      • Driving development of new features/upgrades (if client interest continues to grow)
      • Provide consultancy to analysts and project teams on interpretation of results, modelling process and any limitations there might have to support reporting
        • Developing a basic front-end (either yourself or with support of front-end developers) if client interest is so strong that more junior members of Data Solutions team without programming knowledge are expected to deliver the solutions

PERSON SPECIFICATION

• Technical skills
  • Proficient (production-level) Python, and highly desirable: R
  • Data integration: working with APIs, databases/data warehousing, automated ETL
  • General programming: parallel programming, optimisation of code for speed and quality, handling large amount of data (e.g. GBs from a range of different data sources), and ideally unstructured data
  • ML algorithms/statistical models
  • Essential: econometrics (e.g. Regression, VAR), classification (e.g. Random Forest, XGBoost), clustering (e.g. k-means, knn), optimisation (e.g. Genetic Algorithm)
  • Desirable: NLP, CV
  • Cloud computing experiences (to both deliver and develop solutions); any mainstream cloud services (GCP, AWS, Azure, etc) would be fine, but GCP experience is highly desirable
  • Desirable: web scraping, front-end development (e.g. a simple front-end for internal users using e.g. flask, streamlit, rshiny), advanced data visualisation
• Experiences of developing data science solutions to inform media & creative planning and effectiveness evaluation are highly desirable
• Good communication skills and a team player, proactively contributing to a code review culture

COMPANY BENEFITS

On completion of the three month probation period every employee is eligible for the benefits listed on our careers site which include:

• 25 days holiday a year
• Annual performance bonus
• Sale commission
• Recruitment referrals bonus
• Gym membership contributions
• Ride to Work scheme
• Rail card
• Season Ticket loan
• Free fruit, breakfast cereals and tea & coffee
• Free home office chair and screen
• Enhanced maternity and paternity package
• Life and income protection
• Medical cash plan
• Share option scheme
• Agile Working Policy

Standard hours are from 9.00am to 5.30pm, there’s flexibility if agreed in advance with your line managers (it may also be necessary on occasions to work outside of these hours).

Croud is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the grounds of a person's gender, marital status, race, religion, colour, age, disability or sexual orientation. All candidates will be assessed based on merit, qualifications and their ability to perform the requirements of the role.