Data Scientist

*We're looking for a person who is open to relocation to Berlin.We are Locarta – a location analytics startup based in Berlin. Every day over a million phones send us billions of device data points about where they go in the real world. Hidden inside those terabytes of data are some fascinating insights on people’s behaviours and what that says about them. And we want you to dig them out.

Many interesting challenges await you:- How do you infer the demographics of a group of people whose distribution is different to your training set?- How can you tell whether someone visited a store in cases where you can’t rely on GPS?- How can you detect fake location streams?

The data offers many opportunities for experimentation, such as:

- Are people who saw Ikea’s ad campaign actually more likely to visit Ikea?- How would you optimise public transport based on how people move about a city?- How many people regularly visit two different supermarket chains and why don’t they just stick to one of them?

We’re just starting to scratch the surface of what can be done with this data, and you will help define what’s possible.

How we're different

• Data and insights are our business, not a fashionable side-project
• We are all applied scientists – everything we do is data-driven
• We’re a relatively early-stage startup, which is honestly the most fun time. It’s when the big decisions get made and the most interesting problems need to be solved. It also means things stay varied and interesting
• Our product requires a few great people rather than many good ones. Joining our team will give you lots of opportunities to shape the company from the early days on
• We’re at the forefront of a space that’s about to explode: location analytics is just starting to get really big in the US, while in Europe there are still fewer players
• We believe in keeping people happy, and in our experience that means two things: giving you as much responsibility as you can take and making sure you have opportunities to learn new skills and technologies
• We’re experienced: between us we’ve founded a Y Combinator startup, built the technology for an advertising bidding platform, founded a tech hedge fund and worked at McKinsey
• We have a world-class team of investors and advisors

Skills and requirements

• You have strong mathematical background and feel at home in a nice statistical analysis
• You understand how machine learning works and have a couple of years’ practical experience applying it to real-world problems
• You enjoy finding simple solutions to complex problems, and know how to stop at a ‘good enough’ answer that isn’t necessarily perfect
• You're really good at SciPY, Numpy or Pandas
• You have decent programming skills in at least one of the popular OO languages (Python, Scala, Java, C++, etc.) and can write mission-critical code
• You can clearly explain your work to anyone, even your artsy friend who has no idea about data science, even after a few shots of tequila
• You've used some of the big data frameworks (Spark, Hadoop etc.), or you're really passionate to learn them
• You know how to deal with non-relational databases, such as MongoDB or Elasticsearch
• You are fluent in English (don’t worry – German is not required)

And just a note on privacy: it’s really important to us! Since we collect sensitive data all our panelists are kept anonymous, and we’ve been certified by ePrivacy as conforming to the highest standards of the German law.

This rocket ship is going to Mars – claim your seat!

Support relocation to Germany / Blue Card

You might have to solve a welcome task using Python.

You might have to take a short trip to Berlin to meet us in person. (we compensate travel costs and more)