Data Scientist, Applied Machine Learning

Key Skills

Aartificial intelligence, Clustering, Data science techniques, Databricks, Employee life cycle, Git, Machine learning techniques, MLflow, Natural Language Processing (NLP), NumPy, Pandas, Python Programming, Scikit-learn, SPARK Programming, Statistics

Job Description

Sown To Grow (STG) is a K12 education technology platform that empowers schools to improve student social, emotional, and academic health through an easy and engaging reflection and feedback process. In a short weekly routine, students check-in emotionally and reflect on the strategies that are working best for them (or new ones to try). They start with a focus on emotional well-being and expand to academic goal-setting over time. Teachers, principals, and counselors understand real-time student emotions with AI-driven insights, and proactively support student needs.

Teachers play a crucial role in STG's process; they are responsible for creating a safe space for students, guiding them on writing reflections, and coaching them on strategies when they get stuck. STG uses natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) to both quantitatively measure and qualitatively understand student’s social, emotional and academic health. By applying structure to otherwise unstructured text/emotional data, STG seeks to lift up insights for teachers and support students in a scalable way. We are seeking a Data Scientist experienced in handling substantial volumes of unstructured text data to join our team. In this role, you will develop advanced ML/NLP models aimed at delivering valuable insights to our users, streamlining their ability to respond to student needs with greater ease and efficiency.. You will also fine-tune our existing models, utilizing the latest NLP/ML modeling techniques to boost their precision and accuracy. Your contributions will play a pivotal role as our organization expands to serve millions of students.

About us:

• We understand the challenges schools face - we intimately understand the challenges faced by schools because our founding team spent years working in schools/districts. We take pride in our team, which includes dedicated educators, social workers, and experienced administrators. Together, we work closely with schools every day, aiming to maximize our impact.
• We are dedicated to impact - We've supported renowned, impact focused organizations such as the National Science Foundation, US Department of Education, NewSchools Venture Fund, and Digital Promise. With their support and our unwavering commitment, we've invested significantly in research to ensure that our product creates a meaningful and positive impact within schools and classrooms.
• We are passionate about equity - The majority of STG’s school and district partners serve predominantly low-income communities, which have been historically underserved. Our product is thoughtfully designed to close gaps rather than create them, and ensures that every student has an equal opportunity to thrive.
• We’re small, but mighty - Our tight-knit, agile group is driven by a shared aspiration to make a difference while building a successful business. With team members who have experience working at large, influential organizations such as Meta, IBM, Capital One, and Palantir, we are determined to create a scalable product that impacts millions of students positively.

About you:

We're seeking individuals who embody the following qualities:

• Passion for Impact: We're not just another tech company – we're driven by a deep commitment to making a meaningful difference in the lives of students. If you're passionate about creating positive change and empowering the next generation, you're in the right place.
• Comfort in Ambiguity: In a dynamic start-up environment, change is constant, and the path forward isn't always clear-cut. We're looking for team members who thrive in uncertainty, can craft a strategy on the fly, and execute with confidence and autonomy.
• Sense of Urgency: Time is of the essence in a start-up. If you're someone who enjoys the thrill of moving fast and building with purpose, you'll find our culture both exhilarating and rewarding.
• Aspiration for Growth: While you may have experience at larger organizations, you're ready for a new challenge that offers more responsibility and an opportunity to shape the future. We're here to provide that platform for your professional growth.

Responsibilities:

• Work closely with the data science, product and engineering teams to identify, define, understand, and test opportunities to improve and enhance the product and/or protocol through ML/NLP models
• Help speed up research and productionization of ML/NLP models and projects
• Undertake preprocessing of structured and unstructured data
• Build validation and retraining pipelines to ensure machine learning models continue to perform as code and data change
• Apply best-practice system software and machine learning knowledge to build scalable, reliable, and easy-to-use machine learning workflows in production

Minimum Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree or higher degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Machine Learning, Math, Statistics, or a related field
• 2+ years experience as a ML Engineer, Data Engineer or Data Scientist, solving real world problems using machine learning algorithms
• Proficiency in Python (especially the ML stack - pandas, numpy, scikit-learn, spark etc)
• Experience in building and deploying ML solution that involve Natural Language Processing of text data
• Working knowledge of advanced Machine Learning techniques such as Classification, Clustering, Prediction, Recommender Systems, Anomaly Detection etc
• Working knowledge of complete machine learning lifecycle
• Experience using Git
• Experience writing and maintaining high-quality production code

Preferred Qualifications:

• Strong interest in working in the education technology industry in an impact driven role
• Experience using Databricks and MLflow