Senior Research Data Scientist

Get your hands on the interface that millions of people use every single day

Roku is changing how the world watches TV

Roku is the #1 TV streaming platform in the U.S., and we've set our sights on powering every television in the world. Roku pioneered streaming to the TV. Our mission is to be the TV streaming platform that connects the entire TV ecosystem. We connect consumers to the content they love, enable content publishers to build and monetize large audiences, and provide advertisers unique capabilities to engage consumers.

From your first day at Roku, you'll make a valuable and valued contribution. We're a fast-growing public company where no one is a bystander. We offer you the opportunity to delight millions of TV streamers around the world, while gaining meaningful experience across a variety of disciplines.

About the team

At Roku, the Data Science team lives and works on a kind of frontier: We get called in for things that haven't been done before. This requires meaningful collaboration with the platform team, the firmware team and even the finance team to prove or disprove new product ideas. Often the idea evolves from what was first proposed until it is a wholly new thing that gets shipped. No one here is ashamed to present their latest work, and you'll find yourself pitching ideas to others in the company, including to executives.

Beyond collaboration, we seek builders with the persistence to keep pushing. Because we spend our time making prototypes and testing brand new ideas on systems with a lot of moving parts, we are faced with failures every day. The only way to really make something work is to really dig into the reasons and understand why. We value the grit and persistence it takes to keep just trying.

About the role

Roku pioneered TV streaming and continues to innovate and lead the industry. The Roku Channel has us well-positioned to help shape the future of streaming. Continued success relies on investing in Data Science and diving deep into the economics of our business.

This role is right for you if you enjoy diving into messy data, cleaning it up, finding powerful insights, presenting them in a compelling way, developing models and then working closely with software engineers to automate this process, to prove it out at scale. You should also relish the ability to influence the direction of the team's strategic goals, question the inherent assumptions in our thinking, and defining the business objectives in an innovative and encouraging environment.

The ideal candidate will have endless curiosity and can pair a global mindset with locally relevant execution. You should be a gritty problem solver and self-starter who can drive programs with the product and commercial teams within Roku and across external strategic partner organizations. The successful candidate will display a balance of hard and soft skills, including the ability to respond quickly to changing business needs.

What you'll be doing

• Develop data science algorithms to improve user experience on Roku's platform.
• Develop economic models (e.g., market design, pricing, program evaluation, and forecasting) to better understand the user experience on Roku's platform.
• Run live experiments to prototype the improvements and prove their efficacy.
• Dive into data, clean it up, and pull-out insights that can be used to improve system performance and present to senior leaders with recommendations on business actions.
• Assist the development team with productization of successful algorithms, ensuring your work continues to drive value at scale.
• Provide expert consultative assistance to other teams in the company, including data scientists working in other areas of Roku's stack and provide technical feedback on their econometric work.
• Contribute to the technical vision of the Data Science team.

We're excited if you have

• PhD Degree
• 6 yrs + of experience post PhD in Machine Learning, Operations Research, Applied Mathematics, Statistics, Economics, or similar quantitative field.
• Experience in causal Machine Learning and experimentation.
• Proven problem solving and analytical abilities.
• Software development skills in Python, Java, Julia or Scala.
• Proficiency with analysis tools such as Spark, R, MATLAB or similar.
• Experience with TB or PB size datasets preferred.
• Nice-to-have's include knowledge of user behavior in subscription and advertising-based video, auctions and/or advertising.

The Roku culture

Roku is a great place for people who want to work in a fast-paced environment where everyone is focused on the company's success rather than their own. We try to surround ourselves with people who are great at their jobs, who are easy to work with, and who keep their egos in check. We appreciate a sense of humor. We believe a fewer number of very talented folks can do more for less cost than a larger number of less talented teams. We're independent thinkers with big ideas who act boldly, move fast and accomplish extraordinary things through collaboration and trust. In short, at Roku you'll be part of a company that's changing how the world watches TV.

We have a unique culture that we are proud of. We think of ourselves primarily as problem-solvers, which itself is a two-part idea. We come up with the solution, but the solution isn't real until it is built and delivered to the customer. That penchant for action gives us a pragmatic approach to innovation, one that has served us well since 2002.

Hear from one of our leaders

Or hear directly from dozens of our Roku staff around the world at http://bit.ly/WeAreRokuVideos.

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