Senior Data Scientist Growth Personalization at Hopper

Minimum qualifications
• A degree in Math, Statistics, Computer Science, Engineering or other quantitative discipline

• A minimum of three years experience as a data scientist using data mining, machine learning, statistical modeling algorithms

• Strong analytical skills and creative problem-solving ability

• Ability to answer complex business questions with data, with the curiosity to dive deep and keep asking good questions

• Proven ability to communicate complex technical ideas to a non-technical audience

• Experience in Pandas, Python & R or other large scale data prep and analysis tools

• Experience with SQL databases


Preferred qualifications
• Experience with recommender systems

• Experience with streaming event processing

• Proficiency with Unix/Linux environments

• Experience collaborating with engineers and machine learning engineers in production data science deployment environments

• Ability to design, create, execute and measure consumer-facing experiments

• Experience with business reporting tools such as Tableau, Amplitude

• Able to provide thought leadership on personalization 


About the Job
We’re looking for a motivated data scientist and data wrangler to help us make the Hopper app more engaging and personalized for our users, in order to increase engagement frequency, retention, conversion and ultimately the lifetime value of our customers.

You might be a great fit for our team if you’re a self-starter who thrives on uncertainty, and who’s passionate about exploring the intersection of real business problems with huge (and often messy) data sets, and finding effective ways to simplify and focus on practical opportunities to deliver value to our customers.  To succeed at Hopper you need the talent, drive, and experience to thrive in a fast-moving, high-performing company.

We collect large volumes of user tracking data along with pricing information for air, hotels, cars and more.  We need to create better ways of leveraging this data to personalize the experience users have with us.  Our goal is for the Hopper app to feel like your trusted travel advisor: we remember your preferences, we give you relevant recommendations and helpful advice, and make you feel smarter about buying travel.

We need to develop better systems to aggregate, share and wield the user behavior data we already collect across Hopper, as well as creating new mechanisms to capture user intent throughout the purchase journey.  Specific challenges include making personalized product recommendations in app; orchestrating more personalized conversations through push notifications, email and SMS; and experimenting with incentives to drive re-engagement.


Responsibilities

Ship impactful data-driven product features that increase user lifetime value
Use machine learning and big data tools on large and complex data sets to enhance our data-driven, personalized travel advice
Have ownership of the full data science lifecycle, including partnering with product, engineering and business teams to deliver customer focused products.
Conduct ad hoc exploratory analysis and rapid prototyping to refine product refinements
Create appropriate dashboards for product experiment tracking and business unit performance analysis using Amplitude, Tableau and BigQuery/Google sheets
Collaborate effectively with a multidisciplinary team



Benefits

Well-funded and proven startup with large ambitions, competitive salary and stock options
Unlimited PTO
WeWork All Access Pass OR Work-from-home stipend
Entrepreneurial culture where pushing limits and taking risks is everyday business
Open communication with management and company leadership
Small, dynamic teams = massive impact
100% employer paid medical, dental, vision, disability and life insurance plans
Access to a 401k (US) or Retirement Savings Plan (Canada)



Despite the pandemic’s impact on the travel industry, Hopper has emerged stronger than ever. As the travel industry continues to rebound, Hopper has seen its valuation more than double since early 2020, reflecting the strength of our mobile-only marketplace and the value customers are deriving from our proprietary suite of fintech offerings. 

Here are just a few stats that demonstrate our recent growth:

- Hopper’s valuation is now over $3.5B, reflecting the strength of its mobile-only marketplace and value customers are deriving from the company’s proprietary suite of fintech offerings.

- Based on its current run rate, Hopper is pacing towards 330% revenue growth compared to last year, and it has already surpassed its pre-pandemic revenue peak from Q1 2020 by over 100%.

- Hopper has over 60 million downloads, consistently ranks as one of the most downloaded travel apps, and now has a larger air travel market share in North America than it did before the pandemic (source: MIDT). 

- The company is on track to surpass $1.5 billion in travel sales this year, with 40% coming from the hotel and car rental categories. 

- Hopper’s fintech offerings, such as Price Freeze and Rebooking Guarantee, now represent 50% of its revenue. 

- Given the success of its travel fintech, Hopper recently launched a B2B initiative called Hopper Cloud, where any travel provider can unlock a totally unique revenue stream by seamlessly integrating and offering Hopper’s travel fintech.
 
The industry opportunity for Hopper Cloud is enormous as projections estimate that if all travel distribution channels offered travel fintech, it could increase the total consumer spend for the sector by $200 billion annually.

All this recent growth is just the beginning. There are still so many new opportunities we’re excited to tackle in the next year!