Senior Data Scientist at Heap

Heap is built on a unique dataset of product activity, including hundreds of billions of events across thousands of websites. We’ve automated the process of capturing user behavior, and we’re developing a new category of features to proactively help clients understand and take action on this dataset.
In this role, you’ll research, develop, and productize advanced features for Heap’s product analytics platform. These features will guide PMs’ attention towards “unknown unknowns” in their user behavior, suggest the right questions to ask, and otherwise make it easier to learn something important about their users.
You’ll iterate quickly on challenging and interesting technical problems. How can we automatically identify confusing or frustrating aspects of a customer’s product? What kinds of phenomena are important for a PM to know about, and how can we use an autocaptured dataset to find them? How can we quantify the “interestingness” of a potential result? How can we help PMs avoid overfitting, and protect them from being fooled by confounding factors?
This work is central to Heap’s strategy and to continued success as the leading product analytics platform.
In this role, you’ll:


Be central to our strategy. The core of our product strategy is to produce differentiated insights based on our unique autocapture dataset. You’ll work directly on this problem, creating new features to analyze the Heap dataset and, especially, generate unknown unknowns for our customers.


Turn your expertise into product features. You have experience analyzing data to drive product decisions and company strategy. At Heap, you’ll turn that experience into products so you can deliver that expertise to thousands of PMs.


Impact thousands of products. Heap is a leading player in the product analytics industry, and if your work is successful it will change how thousands of companies understand their users and develop their own products.


Work on a senior and fast moving team. You’ll report to David Robinson, Principal Data Scientist. You’ll work closely with Vijay Umapathy, Director of Product Management, Will Guldin, Senior Product Designer, and our Analysis team led by Asher Eastham.


What you will be doing:

Designing new product features that make proactive suggestions based on behavioral data.
Working with PMs, designers, and engineers to build a product that will reliably lead users to correct insights about their own users.
Analyzing usage of our existing data science features in order to generate improvements.

What we’re looking for: 

3+ years of professional experience as a data scientist
Background in statistics. You’re familiar with the risks of overfitting, confounding factors, and multiple hypothesis testing, and you’re well-versed in statistical methods for handling them.
Practicality: you care about finding effective and robust approaches that can be scaled into products, not about using the newest and shiniest technologies.
Experience in the R toolchain. You’re fluent in transforming, modeling, and visualizing data to solve business problems.
Expertise creating and maintaining R libraries is optional but preferred.
Strong communication skills: able to collaborate with semi-technical stakeholders.
You prefer rapid iteration, and you have a preference for proving out ideas quickly.
An advanced degree (PhD or MS) in a quantitative field is optional but preferred.


People are what make Heap awesome. Regardless of age, education, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or any personal characteristics, we want everyone to feel welcome. We are committed to building a diverse and inclusive equal opportunity workplace everyone can call home.
Heap has raised $95M in funding from NEA, Y Combinator, Menlo Ventures, SVAngel, Sam Altman, Garry Tan, Alexis Ohanian, Harj Taggar, Ram Shriram, and others. We offer plenty of awesome benefits, and we were named #1 on Glassdoor’s Best Places to Work (SMB). We'd love to hear from you!