Stride Funding is hiring a Senior Data Scientist

Stride Funding is a venture-backed, mission-driven start-up transforming access to alternative and higher education. StartupBoston awarded Stride Funding “Startup of the Year” and we are only continuing our positive trajectory forward. Stride believes in the power of education to fuel economic mobility and recognizes the limitations of society's current approach to funding education. At Stride, we seek to increase educational access by leveraging alternative data sets, innovative modeling techniques, and school-supported funding to offer outcomes-driven funding products on the basis of students' future career trajectories, rather than their historical family credit profile. You can play a role in creating meaningful change for our customers, community, and company every day by doing work you truly love, while surrounded by a team that shares your passion!

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​As part of the growing Data Science team at Stride, the Senior Data Scientist will work with the VP of Engineering & Data Science to build a range of full-stack Data Science solutions to support the Company’s pricing and underwriting functions. Specifically, your work will be essential to Stride’s core mission of improving educational access to high-quality higher and alternative education programs for students of all backgrounds. The position provides a unique and exciting opportunity to make a meaningful impact on multiple algorithmic and analytics initiatives that support the Company’s core mission. The Senior Data Scientist will lead a number of initiatives that are part of Stride’s Data Science roadmap and actively contribute to all relevant data and infrastructure efforts to deliver timely solutions that enable Stride’s mission. The Senior Data Scientist will be working closely with the Engineering organization on delivering Data Science solutions that are tightly integrated within Stride’s engineering infrastructure. Given that crucial partnership, the position requires a rigorous understanding of and advanced experience with various software engineering concepts and practices, as well as the ability to work and contribute directly within a scrum-based engineering team on delivering frequent releases of various production-critical solutions and services. In this role, you will have substantial exposure to company executives, who will seek your input on major company initiatives. Success in this role will require close partnership with the CEO, COO, VP of Engineering& Data Science, Director of Finance, and others across the organization to proactively identify analytical needs, validate hypotheses, and collaborate to turn analysis into action.

Responsibilities

• ​Independently manage various full-stack Data Science projects and deliverables
• Assist in managing and overseeing the daily delivery of applicant-level origination attribution, forecasting, data visualization, and reporting information
• Own, develop, and extend various components of Stride’s pricing and underwriting analytics stack to increase accuracy, velocity, and actionability of all performance measurement efforts
• Test, implement and deploy new ML methodologies to drive deeper insights across alternative data sets to improve pricing and income prediction
• Identify new data sources to enhance the accuracy of our various pricing and underwriting models
• Provide comprehensive and consistent reporting and visualizations on the performance and accuracy of various ML algorithms being developed for deployment to production
• Contribute to the development and deployment of A/B testing methodologies and solutions
• Train and mentor junior Data Science team members and help with developing team training materials
• Actively contribute to Stride’s Data Science internal code libraries and pricing and risk-related IP
• Stay abreast of new developments, methods, and technologies in analytics to expand Stride’s repository of effective solutions
• Inspire innovation by uncovering new problems and opportunities

• Bachelor's degree required, Master's degree or Ph.D. preferred, in the field requiring extensive quantitative and/or technical rigor
• 5+ years of experience in full-stack Data Science / Machine Learning
• 3+ years of experience building full-stack Data Science solutions—from rigorous data pipelines to front-end web applications delivering access to Data Science solutions (ML/Visualizations/Interactive UIs)
• 5+ years of experience programming in Python—additional experience in other object-oriented programming languages (Java, C++) is a definite plus
• 2+ years of experience with Python web frameworks (Flask or Django). FastAPI experience a plus.
• Demonstrated expertise in building rigorous SQL code and relying on Python SQL toolkits such as SQL Alchemy (Core / ORM), Django ORM
• Proven ability to lead and contribute to design and deployment of microservices to integrate Data Science solutions within broader production software systems
• Solid experience with CI/CD best practices
• Deep foundation across computer science theory fundamentals--data structures, algorithms, databases, and software design principles, etc.
• Demonstrated ability to dig into findings to a detailed level, translate trends and opportunities into actionable strategies, and tie analytical results to tactical recommendations
• Experience with developing and deploying ML algorithms and solutions that provide actionable insights and quantifiable indicators of effectiveness
• Ability to communicate complex ideas and solution
• High standards for code quality, ability and interest in learning new tech
• Familiar with data warehousing / data lake best practices and industry standards
• Superior analytical and data analysis skills, with background in statistical research and analysis methods
• Outstanding written and verbal communication skills, including comfort presenting to executives
• Courage to stand up for own perspective, even when it may not be the most common opinion​