Principal Applied Data Scientist - Machine Learning
Redwood City, CA

Job Description

We are seeking a Principal Machine Learning Scientist to join the Data Science team at Wealthfront. The primary responsibility of the role is to build machine learning models to facilitate improvements in Financial Planning and Advice with the goal of improving financial outcomes for customers, not merely providing the best advice. Your focus will span topics related to personalization and recommendations. Successful candidates will combine an ability to derive and apply quantitative models to the empirical analysis of financial and client data. Code and models are the way we express insights and analysis, thus you need to be comfortable working with large datasets and writing significant amounts of product-ready code.

Responsibilities

* Build machine learning models for financial planning product
* Curate and collect data to train machine learning models, measure, report and compare the performance with baselines
* Be able to drive a research agenda that is well aligned with business needs
* Maintain a current understanding of industry and technology trends in the area of research
* Improve and accelerate technology with science, machine learning (including deep learning), statistical modeling, algorithm design, and prototyping
* Investigate, identify, and acquire internal / external datasets
* Collaborate with other teams (engineering, product, design, marketing, and compliance) to commercialize new products and ongoing enhancements to existing products

Requirements

* PhD (or equivalent experience) in Computer Science/Statistics plus 4+ years of data product experience with web-scale data. Candidates from related disciplines with a strong focus on machine learning (e.g. operations research, engineering) are also encouraged to apply
* Strong Computer Science fundamentals in data structures, algorithm design and complexity analysis
* Strong fundamentals in applied statistics and probability
* Technically deep in the principles of building large-scale machine learning systems
* Programming competency in Python and Spark
* Strong presentation skills and ability to communicate technical content to an audience with varied backgrounds

Everyone across the financial spectrum deserves to live secure and rewarding lives. In order to successfully serve clients across the United States, the Wealthfront team is focused on hiring team members with a diverse range of backgrounds, experiences and perspectives. We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.

About Wealthfront

Wealthfront pioneered the category today known as "robo-advisors" when the company launched its automated investment service in 2011. Today, we manage over $12 billion for our clients and have expanded our service to offer free financial planning to anyone as well as cash management solutions with our recently launched FDIC insured Cash Account.

But we're not done there. Our vision is to optimize and automate all of our clients' finances, and build Self-Driving Money™️. We want clients to be able to automatically deposit their paycheck into their Wealthfront account and take care of the rest -- paying their bills, topping off their emergency fund or 401(k) and investing the rest based on their specific goals and lifestyle. To get there, we'll be focusing the bulk of our efforts on reinventing the way we currently bank in the U.S. in 2019. The banking industry is one of the most non-client centric industries in existence and we hope you join us to flip the script and rebuild it from the ground up.