Have you ever had the opportunity to impact the lives of millions of people in a meaningful way and help them enjoy time away with their friends and families building memories? That is what we do here at HomeAway.com. We are the leading vacation rental website with over two million online bookable vacation rentals. Our mission is to make every vacation rental in the world available to every traveler through our online marketplace and we're committed to helping families and friends find the perfect vacation rental to create unforgettable travel experiences together. As for engineering, we solve problems of scale and work on cutting edge and open-source technologies. Our culture is one that strives on solving difficult problems focusing on product engineering based on hypothesis testing to empower people to come up with ideas.
To understand the mission of HomeAway watch our ad by Prince EA, Working to Live or Living to Work, on our YouTube channel, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNRldP18bH8!

Visit our Tech Blog at http://tech.homeaway.com

Job Description:Love data, science, technology & coding? How about vacations? Want to be part of a team where that all comes together? Want a chance to drive an extraordinary experience for travelers by connecting them with millions of vacation rental properties? Passionate about building and putting complex models into production to solve relevance and personalization problems, great at model testing and evaluation using scientific approaches and feature engineering? If so, then HomeAway has a Data Scientist role for you and would like to talk to you!

The content and media team is responsible for the core text/media aggregation and intelligence services within HomeAway. Our systems handle automatic content sourcing using structured/unstructured data, along with crawling of the semantic web to build a knowledge graph of destinations, points of interests and other information. Our products present this information to travelers and convey the best attributes of a destination and why a vacation rental from HomeAway is the best option. Additionally our systems derive signals from the millions of data points we collect from our users to make the rest of HomeAway better.

Some of the systems we are working on:

• Classify images at scale to understand what content lies within an image and to generate captions and text
• Reverse Image Search technology to find fraudulent listings and related properties
• Recommendation systems that automatically derive user interests using passive signals like dwell time or photo expand
• Automatically generate quality scores of imagery submitted by our users and owners to feed back into other parts of our system
• Automatic text generation from structured and unstructured input like amenities, nearby attractions
• Entity extraction from unstructured text

Responsibilities:

• Serve as the Data Guru of the company - i.e be aware of data streams collected in the company in any format (structured, unstructured, semi-structured, external API etc.)
• Work on larger programs/initiatives encompassing several projects that have a company-wide impact
• Assist others with data discovery and data preparation phase
• Understand the “big picture” our data presents
• Work closely with various Product, Business and Engineering teams
• Frame analytic problem statements in response to business and product challenges
• Be an authority in the Exploratory phase and prescriptive analysis - i.e build and assess models, review results, etc.
• Deployment of various models in Production
• Articulate storytelling to business & product leaders - i.e focus on telling the “business” story that the data shows (and abstract the data complexities and process involved) and have a strong influence on the audience

Qualifications:

• 8+ years of experience in Data Science and analytics fields
• Experience with programming languages such as R, Python, or Scala
• Experience in processing and analyzing large scale data volumes, semi-structured and unstructured data and near real-time throughput
• Experience working in Hadoop ecosystem
• Experience building various Machine learning models
• Strong database knowledge and expertise in SQL
• Experience using visualization tools such as Tableau and Datameer
• Good storytelling and presentation skills i.e be able to present business side of the story that data presents to c-team and business leaders
• Masters or Ph.D in Statistics, Math, Computer Science or other quantitative field

Benefits:

• Competitive health and insurance benefits
• Competitive salary
• Annual target bonus or commission
• Paid vacation and sick time
• Vacation rental on a yearly basis (taxable benefit)
• Employee Stock Purchase Program
• Free snacks and beverages
• Frequent company update talks with our leadership team
• Free listing on HomeAway.com
• Electric, adjustable stand-up desk
• Discounted Metro & Rail pass
• Casual dress code