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Snapshot

We’re looking for an applied data scientist to join Google DeepMind’s internal data & analytics group. Working closely with stakeholders, you will provide clarity and structure to ambiguous business problems to guide strategic decisions specifically around our compute and infrastructure strategy, contributing directly to Google DeepMind’s mission of bringing the benefits of AI to the world!

About Us

Artificial Intelligence could be one of humanity’s most useful inventions. At Google DeepMind, we’re a team of scientists, engineers, machine learning experts and more, working together to advance the state of the art in artificial intelligence. We use our technologies for widespread public benefit and scientific discovery, and collaborate with others on critical challenges, ensuring safety and ethics are the highest priority.

You’ll join the Core Analytics Team (CAT) within the Tech Ops & Analytics group at Google DeepMind, comprising a software engineer & data scientists. We ultimately aim to drive better organisational decisions – blending our technical skillset with rich stakeholder relationships to deliver impact. The outcomes of our work, ranging across topics like (but not limited to!) compute purchase and efficiency, research organisation, and recruitment optimisation, directly influence Google DeepMind’s progress towards our mission.

The role

We’re looking for someone who is skilled at and motivated by helping make sound decisions using quantitative data. This role will specialise in the area of compute management exploring areas like the efficiency of our accelerators and infrastructure.

You’ll bring a particular expertise and perspective around how to most effectively conduct analyses – liaising with engineering colleagues to ensure we collect the right telemetry at source, and working with technical program managers to translate those (and other!) insights into clear decisions both for leadership and process owners.

You’ll also be expected to contribute to our team environment – sharing your knowledge, coaching other analysts, helping articulate and prioritise our common roadmap, and using your experience of analytics in other organisations to make improvements to how we operate.

A core set of the responsibilities this role encompasses:

• Work with partners to identify relevant high-level product & business questions and propose appropriate data-focused analysis
• Conduct rigorous, verifiable analysis (SQL, Python) to answer those questions
• Develop tools (dashboards, reports, web apps) to enable continuous monitoring of key metrics and enable user self-service
• Apply statistical and machine learning techniques to analyse large and complex datasets aiming to extract actionable recommendations
• Communicate via presentations and written reports to a wide variety of stakeholders (with varying levels of seniority, technical and domain familiarity) – following through to ensure impact
• Manage several projects simultaneously, exhibiting good project and time management skills (timelines, expectations, progress, etc.)
• Collaborate effectively as part of a team of other data scientists, engineers and project managers
• Recommend changes to product/engineering roadmaps to improve data quality in source systems
• Submit tested code into source control for review
• Coach and mentor others in their own use of analytical tools and techniques

About you

What we are looking for in the ideal candidate:

You have several years of experience as a data scientist at another organisation, and know how to effectively bring analytics ‘into contact’ with organisational decisions. This is a mid level role and while there’s no exact amount of experience necessary we expect to see a track record of delivery in other organisations and a clear perspective on what effective analytics looks like.

You excel at analytical problem solving with a ‘nose for data’, knowing which questions to ask of it, how to go about answering those questions, and how to ensure that your answer is correct.

You enjoy using a variety of tools to answer the question at hand. You recognise that there are lots of potential ways to approach a problem, and enjoy choosing the right tool for the job. You’re comfortable teaching yourself new technologies and techniques when appropriate.

You consider yourself ‘business savvy’. You have proven experience working with a variety of different internal partners, and an intuition for which questions are most important to hone in on in service of our mission.

You are passionate about  ‘storytelling’ with data. You can take an ambiguous question and probe further, figuring out the trajectory to a meaningful story. You know how to effectively express uncertainty in your conclusions, and key assumptions that have gone into the analytical process.

Other qualities we’re looking for:

• You have experience with cloud compute metrics, systems, and analytics infrastructure
• You’re interested in elements of compute and infrastructure efficiency and understand the tension in measuring different types of efficiency
• You are comfortable extracting and manipulating data via SQL (especially BigQuery and Google’s StandardSQL implementation) and Python and the PyData stack (e.g. Pandas, Scikit-learn, Numpy, Jupyter). Bonus points if you’re familiar with handling extremely large datasets.
• You like to ‘work quantitatively’, and have at least a solid understanding  of statistical concepts that let you express uncertainty in your analysis and assumptions
• You’ve previously taught yourself new tools/techniques to expand your skill set, and are excited to continue doing so within a supportive community of analysts
• You have experience partnering with senior decision-makers in a professional setting and presenting the implications of your analysis for their consideration
• You consistently strive to see ‘beyond the data’ and understand what your analysis represents in terms of actual reality/experience
• You enjoy collaborating widely, and partnering with others to motivate action and change

If you don’t think you embody all of the above criteria, please still seriously consider applying! This role (and therefore the requirements) is broad, and we’d be excited to discuss how you see yourself contributing across it.