The Opportunity
At BridgeU, our vision is to bring the power of big data and machine intelligence to high school students across the world, helping to improve decision-making at crucial stages of their lives. After closing a £4m Series A funding round in 2017, BridgeU is growing quickly, now with well over 100,000 students on our system. The near future contains some exciting challenges: as well as targeting 100% growth in our number of active users, we are currently launching a new business stream, selling to universities; this will enable universities to more efficiently reach out to international schools, understand the drivers for internationally mobile students, and ultimately improve access to underrepresented groups.
We are looking for someone to lead and grow our data team, and with data at the core of almost everything we do there are some big and exciting challenges ahead. The team is still relatively small (3 Data Scientists / Engineers in London, and one Data Researcher in the Philippines), so we are looking for someone who will be able to combine management of the team with individual contribution.
What you’ll be doing:
*Leading the data team, both as a line manager and helping to technically develop team members.
*Communicating between different teams in the company, understanding their problems, and ensuring that the data team’s work is focused on solving the right problems.
*Writing and reviewing production code (mostly in Python). Our data team is responsible for writing parts of the code that it used by the app, as well as developing models.
*Creatively solving a variety of other business problems - you will be working in a small team of three people in a fast growing, data-driven Startup, so will have regular and varied challenges. Every day ends up being a bit different!
What you’ll bring:
*Good interpersonal and communication skills.
*Strong programming skills (particularly Python, SQL, Git), along with the ability and desire to help teach and develop others.
*Experience working with real world data. You don’t have to be a Data *Scientist, but you should understand the complexities of dealing with and cleaning messy data.
*Some understanding of cloud-based ETL / data pipelining architectures (we currently use Google DataFlow, BigQuery and Apache Beam, but understanding of alternatives is fine).
*A broad understanding of the state of ML as a whole, giving you the ability to intelligently discuss various modelling approaches and understand their shortcomings.
*Some familiarity with using data and machine learning packages in Python (Numpy, Pandas, Scikit-Learn etc.).
*Pragmatism. There is always lots of important stuff to do, and whilst we always want to produce work of the highest quality, the ability to balance this with the needs of a fast moving startup is crucial.
*Creativity. Often the ideal data isn’t available, or there are limitations that prevent the use of standard approaches. You will need the ability to come up with novel solutions to problems, and go out in search of data or knowledge that we may not already have.
*Enthusiasm and positivity! The friendly culture at BridgeU is very important to us, and we believe that a positive attitude goes a long way.
What we’ll provide
*Competitive salary depending on your experience
*Personal development: the company can fund books, courses and conferences that can help you learn and grow.
*Investment time: every two weeks on Friday we spend time investing in our own learning or collaborating with projects that can benefit the company or the community.
*Opportunities for flexible and remote working hours, encouraging everyone to have a healthy work-life balance
*Annual offsite: we organise a retreat once a year where the whole company gets together
*Regular socials and early finish Fridays once a month
*A comfortable office in Angel stocked with fruit, tea/coffee, snacks, ice creams, a drinks fridge, and a ping pong table
*Career progression and development
*Private health insurance (upon completion of probation)
*Employer’s pension scheme
*An open and democratic work culture where everyone can contribute, learn and teach
Our Culture
We strive to be an awesome company to work for, making sure that the right processes are in place for everyone to work at their best. We believe strongly in work life balance and offer a work from home day, flexible working hours and 10% investment time.
Equal Opportunities
We are a global team with a global mindset, cherishing and protecting diversity as one of our core values. We are always looking to diversify the talent in our team and with that in mind would especially encourage applications from female candidates, and any candidates from an ethnic minority background. Applications from individuals are encouraged regardless of age, disability, sex, gender reassignment, sexual orientation, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion, belief, marriage or civil partnership.
