Senior Data Scientist Search And Recommendations at Newsela

The Role:
The Senior Data Scientist will improve the Content Discovery experience for teachers and students, primarily working on improving personalization and search relevance. You will identify and improve algorithms feeding into our personalization and search engines to drive meaningful improvements on user engagement. Additionally, you will evaluate your candidate algorithms ( heuristics-based or machine learning/NLP approaches), by using the appropriate offline and online metrics for A/B tests. You will also become an expert at our user problems, using data to validate user problems and understand our content. These understandings can translate into automating signals to feed into our search relevance and personalization engines. Reporting to the Director of Data Science, you will partner closely with the Search and Recommendations product, engineering, and design teams to have a holistic understanding of our Content Discovery strategy..
Why You’ll Love This Role: 
As a member of our growing Data Science team, you will have the opportunity to build our search and personalization engines from the ground up, directly impacting educational outcomes of our students. You will have the opportunity to improve search relevance, work with NLP by developing algorithms. You will also gain exposure to the educational space and how students learn in the classroom. Your work will have a direct impact on helping teachers quickly find meaningful materials for their classrooms and engaging and appropriate content for students, which will ultimately scale Newsela’s ability to bring engaging, culturally responsive learning content to K-12 classrooms nationwide.
Why We’ll Love You: 
You have 3-5 years of experience in data science and machine learning, preferably with experience in search relevance. You have demonstrated success in an end-to-end machine learning pipeline, from analysis to choosing of algorithms, to working with the engineering team to deploy to production. You are able to leverage your product-thinking mindset and expertise in machine learning tradeoffs to effectively choose solutions best for teachers and students. You prefer deploying practical solutions to test rather than researching theoretical ideas, and you prefer simple, interpretable solutions over complexity.  While not required, experience with a content platform and personalization engines, or experience with NLP is a plus.
About Newsela
One of the fastest growing tech companies in K-12 education, Newsela was founded on the principle that while every child may have unique learning preferences, they all deserve a rich learning experience that ignites a love of learning. We built our platform based on learning science research to deliver the most engaging, authentic content to modernize how teaching happens in the classroom. Along with interactive assessments and tools, we provide teachers with digital content at five reading levels -- from +100 of the best sources -- that is relevant to the diverse backgrounds and interests of their students. Since we started in 2013, we’ve established a presence in 90% of U.S. K-12 schools and over 2.5M teachers and 37M students have registered with Newsela.