Staff Data Scientist, Core

Key Skills

Python Programming, Google BigQuery, Looker, Tableau

Job Description

We're Cruise, a self-driving service designed for the cities we love.

We’re building the world’s most advanced, self-driving vehicles to safely connect people to the places, things, and experiences they care about. We believe self-driving vehicles will help save lives, reshape cities, give back time in transit, and restore freedom of movement for many.

Cruisers have the opportunity to grow and develop while learning from leaders at the forefront of their fields. With a culture of internal mobility, there's an opportunity to thrive in a variety of disciplines. This is a place for dreamers and doers to succeed.

If you are looking to play a part in making a positive impact in the world by advancing the revolutionary work of self-driving cars, join us.

We're Cruise, a self-driving service designed for the cities we love.

We’re building the world’s most advanced, self-driving vehicles to safely connect people to the places, things, and experiences they care about. We believe self-driving vehicles will help save lives, reshape cities, give back time in transit, and restore freedom of movement for many.

Cruisers have the opportunity to grow and develop while learning from leaders at the forefront of their fields. With a culture of internal mobility, there's an opportunity to thrive in a variety of fields. This is a place for dreamers and doers to succeed. If you are looking to play a part in making a positive impact in the world by advancing the revolutionary work of self-driving cars, join us.

The Data Science and Analytics team is dedicated to organizing our data, building metrics and models to explain and diagnose the performance of our AV technology. Our team guides strategic decision making through statistical analysis and experimentation, and improves the AV stack with data driven models, decision thresholds, and simulation testing. As a Staff Data Scientist you’ll be responsible for building ML models based on petabytes of autonomous driving data using the most advanced cloud technologies, in-house data processing, and data modeling tools.

What you’ll be doing:

As a Staff Data Scientist - Core, you will work directly with an array of partners, including executive leadership, Autonomous Vehicle (AV) engineers, product managers, and operations teams.

As a leader, you will demonstrate and develop team-building skills by:

• Defining success criteria from ambiguous problem statements;
• Defining the road map for your product area
• Mentoring fellow Data Scientists and fostering a positive, collaborative work environment;
• Role-modeling a humble, positive, and growth-oriented attitude;
• Translating complex concepts into clear and meaningful recommendations for partners.

As an individual contributor, you will be responsible for extracting high-impact insights from our extensive collection of on-road and simulation data by:

• Creating novel features and machine learning models, using modeling frameworks such as linear/logistic regressions, gradient boosting decision trees and neural networks;
• Analyzing model performance and feature importance;
• Developing statistical error bounds for safety-critical models, and performing power analyses for predictive experiments.
• Analyzing the results of driving and simulation to uncover performance changes, and the source of those changes.
• Creating tools and reports that explain model predictions to partners using Jupyter notebooks and dashboarding tools such as Looker.
• Deploying production systems that deliver continuous insights;
• Collaborating with team members to build shareable tools, methods, and dashboards.
• Converting insights into concrete, significant recommendations for business or product improvement, and succinctly communicate these findings to various partners and leadership.

The ideal candidate for this role is passionate about the AV Industry, has a track record of discovering insights from extensive data, and works to discover and address customer needs through their output.

What you must have:

• A Masters or PhD degree or equivalent experience.
• 5+ years post-academic experience in data science, machine learning, or a closely-related field.
• Significant statistical experience in data-intensive on-line systems. Examples include real-time metrics tracking systems and A/B testing methodologies.
• Experience deploying feature and model pipelines at scale, and monitoring model performance.
• Experience designing, training, and critically analyzing ML models for big data.
• Experience developing and maintaining automated reporting tools for management and other partners.
• Productive in both SQL and Python.
• Creative, inventive, and passionate about seeking new solutions to problems and opportunities
• A track record of leading multi-functional initiatives
• Experience in advising leadership at the director, VP and CTO level on technical strategy and tech teams talent needs.

Bonus Points!

• Experience with MapReduce frameworks (Hadoop, Spark, BigQuery) and/or Apache Beam/Google Dataflow
• Experience with DAG orchestrators (eg. Airflow/Kubeflow-Pipelines/Luigi)
• Experience with statistical analysis of ML model performance
• Consumer-facing product experience

Why Cruise?

• Our benefits are here to support the whole you:
• Competitive salary and benefits
• 401(k) Cruise matching program 
• Medical / dental / vision, AD+D and Life
• One Medical membership
• Subsidized mental health benefits
• Flexible vacation and company paid holidays
• Healthy meals and snacks provided for non-remote employees
• Paid parental, jury duty, bereavement, family care and medical leave
• Fertility Benefits
• Dependent Care Flexible Spending Account, subsidized by Cruise
• Flexible Spending Account 
• Monthly wellness stipend
• Pre-tax Commuter Benefit Plan for non-remote employees
• CruiseFlex - a working policy for US-Based Cruisers that lets you and your manager find what working style is best for you, whether it’s primarily in-person, primarily at home or a combination of home and in-office time.

• We’re Integrated
• Through our partnerships with General Motors and Honda, we are the only self-driving company with fully integrated manufacturing at scale.

• We’re Funded
• GM, Honda, Microsoft, T. Rowe Price & Walmart have invested billions in Cruise. Their backing for our technology demonstrates their confidence in our progress, team, and vision and makes us one of the leading autonomous vehicle organizations in the industry. Our deep resources greatly accelerate our operating speed.

• We’re Independent
• We have our own governance, board of directors, equity, and investors. Our independence allows us to not just work on the edge of technology, but also define it.

• We’re Vested
• You won’t just own your work here, you’ll have the potential to own equity in Cruise, too. We are competing in a market that is projected to grow exponentially, which gives our company valuation room to grow.
• Recurring Liquidity Opportunity (RLO) - a unique equity program where employees, both current and former, have the option to sell any amount of their vested equity on a recurring basis, currently quarterly.