Research Scientist Verizon Media
New York, NY

Job Description

It takes powerful technology to connect our brands and partners with an audience of 1 billion. Nearly half of Verizon Media employees are building the code and platforms that help us achieve that. Whether you're looking to write mobile app code, engineer the servers behind our massive ad tech stacks, or develop algorithms to help us process 4 trillion data points a day, what you do here will have a huge impact on our business-and the world. Want in? As Verizon's media unit, our brands like Yahoo, TechCrunch and HuffPost help people stay informed and entertained, communicate and transact, while creating new ways for advertisers and partners to connect. With technologies like XR, AI, machine-learning, and 5G, we're transforming media for tomorrow, too. We're creators and coders, dreamers and doers creating what's next in content, advertising and technology.

About Verizon Media

Verizon Media is a values-led company committed to building brands people love. We reach over one billion people around the world with a dynamic house of 50+ media and technology brands. A global leader in digital and mobile, Verizon Media is shaping the future of media.

Verizon Media is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to, and will not be discriminated against based on age, race, gender, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran status, disability or any other protected category. Verizon Media is dedicated to providing an accessible environment for all candidates during the application process and for employees during their employment.

About Yahoo! Research

Working in AI, machine learning and many more research areas at a global scale of 1 billion users, Yahoo! Research, part of Verizon Media, builds the breakthroughs that power our media, communication, search, and ad tech brands.

About Data Science

The Data Science team hires the best scientific minds who like to roll up their sleeves to make new discoveries that contribute to the success of the business, and can be presented at the top scientific conferences. Our scientists specialize in mining large amounts of data from the Verizon Media's scale of billions of global users, to make or inform business decisions. We design and invent algorithms to push the boundaries of the intelligence, performance and security of our platforms, to mine huge amounts of data to get knowledge and understanding, and to find patterns and anomalies. We evaluate the impact in Web-scale production settings. We actively contribute to the scientific and open source communities in Computer Science and related areas.

About You

We have an exciting job opening for a top Research Scientist who are ready to make a significant impact. Research Scientists are individual contributors to the organization. Through compelling data mining, machining learning, and visualization algorithms, they gain knowledge and make decisions from data, and help our company to build better and more secure platforms and products.

Position Responsibilities:

* Deep dive into the data to find patterns and gain knowledge through innovation and application of scalable algorithms.


* Work closely with colleagues on the engineering team to put research results into action.


* Provide thought leadership to guide the direction of Verizon Media products and services.


* Be a leader in your research area and look to influence our products and services with your expertise.



This position will work on the following areas to improve content and ad personalization, securing our systems, and safeguarding Tumblr:

* In user profiling, we have significantly improved Tumblr user gender/age classification accuracy, and pushed the classifiers to production. We just started a project to embark on gender classification for all users with SIDs, which is very important since gender information is vital for successful ad targeting, but we no longer ask for it when users register with us.


* In network security, we have developed ML algorithms and data augmentation pipeline that results in 11 Jira security tickets filed that uncover various security anomalies. We are extending this effort to look at DNS tunneling and data exfiltration.


* We have been working with SMP in image classification, and has made good improvement in improving false positive rate in classifying Not Safe For Work (NSFW) images.



As a Research Scientist in AI/ML, the person will contribute to the three existing high impacting projects in user profiling, network security and image classification. This position will also work to identify new business opportunities through mining large amounts of data. This may include payment system security, content moderation (hate speech, self abuse, terrorism), general anomaly detection (time series analysis of monitoring or Tumblr data), and a multitude of future projects requiring AI/ML.

Minimum Qualifications

* PhD in Computer Science or related fields.


* Strong academic research track record in one of the following areas: Data Mining and Visualization, Applied Machine Learning, and related areas.


* Strong implementation skills in Java, Scala, Python etc. Experience with large-scale production code development a plus.


* Ability to conduct research that is justified and guided by business opportunities


* Strong communication and presentation skills.



Verizon Media is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to, and will not be discriminated against based on age, race, gender, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran status, disability or any other protected category. Verizon Media is dedicated to providing an accessible environment for all candidates during the application process and for employees during their employment. If you need accessibility assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability, please email ApplicantAccommodation@verizonmedia.com or call 408-336-1409. Emails/calls received for non-disability related issues, such as following up on an application, will not receive a response.

Currently work for Verizon Media? Please apply on our internal career site.