Director, Data Science

Imgur is the world’s largest image-sharing community and the best place to share and enjoy the most awesome images on the internet. Every day, millions of people visit Imgur to be entertained and inspired by funny, heartwarming and helpful images and stories from all around the world.

As our Director of Data Science, you will be a hands on leader helping to build out our Data Engineering and Ops team, as well as applying large-scale data mining, machine learning, and information retrieval techniques to help build a powerful personalization, image recommendation and search engine. We are looking for someone who is passionate about big data and wants to lead a team, while being hands on.

• Building out a team of strong machine learning data engineers as well as managing their day to day responsibilities
• Work closely with our VP, Engineering to set strategic initiatives, goals and metrics
• Performing research and develop sophisticated recommendations, personalization, and search engines.
• Performing data mining, machine learning, and information retrieval techniques on very large data sets.
• Using distributed big data storage and processing tools like Hadoop, MapReduce and Spark.
• Working on products which serve millions of users every day.
• Studying image recognition/understanding, performing natural language processing and sentiment analysis, discovering trending memes, modeling user behaviors, and much more.
• Exploring future data-driven products.

• PhD or Master’s in Computer Science or related discipline focusing on machine learning, information retrieval, computer vision, natural language processing, and related areas.
• Minimum of 4 years of relevant experience working on search relevancy, personalization/recommender systems, big data, and related areas.
• Experience leading a team of data engineers
• Expert in supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning techniques. Have ready knowledge of linear regression, support vector machines, logistic regression, clustering, decision trees, multi-layer perceptron, belief nets, genetic algorithms, etc.
• Expert in scientific and systems programming languages such as: Java, Python, R, etc.
• Expert in big data computing frameworks like Spark, Pig, or MapReduce.
• Familiar with open source machine learning packages like Spark MLlib, NumPy, Pandas, scikit-learn, Weka, Mahout, etc.
• Working knowledge of SQL.
• Bonus points for knowledge of Scala, Matlab, and/or C/C++