The Role: 

Using quantitative data to model user behavior on Newsela, the Senior Data Scientist of Recommendations will work on data science projects to build out a suite of recommendation systems for Newsela. You will be collaborating closely with the Product and Systems Engineering teams to deploy the research to live users. Your goal is to improve the ease of discovering content for teachers in their lesson plans, and to recommend content to students to improve their educational outcomes. Your research will translate 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.

Why You’ll Love This Role: 

Reporting to the Director of Data Science, you’ll work closely with Data Scientists, Engineers, Product, and Content teams to improve content discovery. You’ll have exposure to Newsela’s Search team and will delve into 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 U.S. You’ll also have the opportunity to build a complex recommendations system from the ground up that will impact literacy and other learning outcomes. And you’ll get to be part of a culture that values teaching and learning internally as much as externally.

Why We’ll Love You:

You have 3+ years of practical machine learning experience, and have experience with showing users the content they want to see (such as media, e-commerce, advertising). 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. Ideally, you’ve worked on recommendation systems in the past. 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 love learning more about information retrieval. You are fluent in SQL and Python (or other scripting languages), and you are comfortable using git and Linux environments. You have experience working alongside product managers to take business outcomes and break them down into projects. You are passionate about improving literacy for students and empowering teachers to find the best content for the classroom.

 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.