The Role: 

Reporting to the Director of Data Science, you will lead and formulate data science projects to drive high level decisions, as well as day-to-day development for the purpose of improving the Newsela search service, focusing on search relevance. You will be collaborating closely with the product and systems engineering teams to deploy the research from the team to live users. Your goal is to improve the ease of discovering content for our platform’s teachers and students. You’ll advise the team on research that translates into solving real-world problems, with an emphasis on live testing. Your work is driven by practical applications, continuously tying development to tangible outcomes based on the product roadmap. You’ll help to define KPIs and metrics for search, both offline and online, and establish best practices in collecting training data.

Why You’ll Love This Role: 

You’ll work closely with data scientists, engineers, product, and content teams to improve search relevance, particularly on learning-to-rank problems. As a data science lead on the team, you’ll be encouraging thought leadership, evangelizing new technologies, and keeping up to date on the latest research. You’ll cross-pollinate ideas with the recommendation team and be an expert at Newsela on information retrieval techniques. You’ll be at the forefront of using cutting-edge technologies to improve the learning experience of K-12 education across the nation. You’ll also have the opportunity to build a complex system from the ground up and be part of a culture that values teaching and learning. You’ll have the ability to shape the search roadmap with partnership from the product team.

Why We’ll Love You:

You have 5+ years of practical machine learning experience in industry, specifically with experience in search engines. You understand the complexities of building out live machine learning pipelines in production, and have experience choosing metrics to monitor as well as understand tradeoffs between modeling decisions. You prefer deploying practical solutions to test rather than researching theoretical ideas without live data. You think about the architecture and system of interactions between different algorithms. Bonus if you have experience with knowledge graphs and how it relates to content, experience with NLP, or topic modeling. You are experienced in information retrieval, fluent in SQL and Python (or other scripting languages), and you are comfortable using git and Linux environments. You are passionate about enhancing learning for students and empowering teachers to find the best content for the classroom. You also have experience working alongside product managers to take business outcomes and break them down into projects.

 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.