Senior Data Scientist, Search Experience

This hybrid position requires two days per week in the office at the nearest hub. 

About you 

You’re an analytical problem-solver ready to put your skills toward purposeful work that has a global impact. You want to lead the way in innovation, exploring the latest technologies and finding new solutions. You thrive in a collaborative environment and are eager to work with and learn alongside the best in Product, Design, and Engineering.

About your Skills

• Strategic Thinking: You possess a strategic mindset, envisioning the long-term direction of projects and initiatives and making informed decisions that align with organizational goals and drive sustainable growth and innovation.
• Adaptability and Learning Agility: You thrive in dynamic environments, quickly adapting to new technologies, methodologies, and challenges. Your eagerness to learn and ability to pivot effectively contribute to the team's success in a rapidly evolving industry.
• Leadership and Mentorship Abilities: You have a track record of inspiring and empowering team members, providing guidance and mentorship to junior engineers, and fostering a culture of continuous learning and growth within the team.
• Cross-functional Partnership: You excel in managing stakeholder expectations, fostering positive relationships with internal teams, users, and other key stakeholders, and effectively communicating technical decisions, project progress, and milestones.

About this role 

As a Senior Data Scientist on the Search team, you will build scalable search algorithms fueled by machine learning and data-driven processes. You will collaborate with other Data Scientists, Product Managers and engineers to improve Udemy’s search product. We have an exciting road map ahead of us with a conversational search system targeting to guide learners find the best matching content and help them reach their goals. This role contains challenges of building a reliable real-time conversational system with LLMs, building search algorithms to find the most relevant learning content and designing A/B experiments to iterate on these algorithms.

What you'll be doing

• You will be driving the development of sophisticated data models and algorithms. Your expertise will be crucial in fine tuning ML models.
• You will develop innovative approaches to build data products and implement fast prototypes.
• You will implement evaluation strategies for LLM based conversational search systems and optimize these with prompt engineering, knowledge distillation or fine-tuning methods. 
• You will stay at the cutting edge of advancements in data science, NLP, LLMs, machine learning, and prompt engineering.
• You will implement complex data pipelines and maintain/monitor them. 
• You will form product hypotheses, implement metrics and design A/B experiments to quantitatively measure product success. 
• You will communicate project status to non-technical stakeholders.

What you’ll have

• 3+ years of full-time experience with machine learning, data science or equivalent research experience.
• Strong knowledge of machine learning and hands-on experience in a variety of fundamental methods like regression, classification, clustering using libraries like scikit-learn, LightGBM etc.
• A solid understanding of analytics, statistics, and probability. This includes familiarity with statistical tests, distributions, data analysis techniques, effectively interpreting and communicating statistical information.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills enable you to effectively articulate technical concepts and findings to non-technical team members and stakeholders.
• Experience with relevant programming languages (e.g. Python).
• Experience writing complex SQL queries.
• Experience with deep learning frameworks (e.g. Tensorflow, PyTorch).
• Experience building products using LLMs. Knowledge of prompting techniques, prompt-tuning, Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and familiarity with techniques like fine-tuning and knowledge distillation.

We understand that not everyone will match each of the above qualifications. However, we also realize that everyone has unique experiences that can add value to our company. Even if you think your background might not perfectly align, we'd love to hear from you!

Life at Udemy

We aspire to be as vibrant and dynamic as the communities we serve, as inquisitive as those who use our platform, and as revolutionary as the future we strive to open for everyone. Here are some of the things we love about life at Udemy:

• We’re invested in creating an inclusive environment that welcomes a diverse range of backgrounds and experiences. From creating employee resource groups, ensuring we’re a Fair Pay Workplace, and building a flexible work culture, our belonging, equity, diversity, and inclusion (BEDI) initiatives always put our people first. We want you to be able to bring your authentic self to work because when we all do, we’re better for it.

• Learning is what we do – inside and out. Our Learning & Development team is second to none, helping ensure your journey is one of continuous progression. You’ll also have unlimited access to Udemy courses, monthly UDays (meeting-free professional development days), and a generous annual professional development stipend.

• Our reason to exist is to revolutionize learning – that calls for taking risks and learning from failures. Whether it’s our hackathons (a company-wide effort to envision new possibilities for our product) or sharing our prototypes, we see experimentation as a crucial step on the path to success.

• We’re committed to creating world-class employee experiences and are proud of the recognition of this by Great Place to Work. 

Of course, the best thing about being part of Udemy is knowing your work makes a difference for people and organizations around the world. You’ve got the skills; why not use them to help others develop theirs?

At Udemy, we value diversity and inclusion and consider qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, ancestry, age, genetic information, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital or family status, veteran status, medical condition, or disability. 

Our Benefits Start With U

Our benefits package at Udemy “starts with U” and is grounded in mission-driven benefits that intentionally align with our core values. Here’s a sneak peek at just a few highlighted benefits if you’re a full-time Udemate based in the Türkiye:

• Core Benefits: Comprehensive medical, dental, life and income protection coverage

• Parental Benefits: Financial assistance for fertility (including egg-freezing), adoption, and surrogacy expenses; twelve weeks of paid family bonding for birth, surrogacy, adoption, and foster placement. 16 weeks paid maternity leave for birthing parents as well as a two-week “ease-back” program that enables parents to return part-time at full pay

• Whole U: Fully paid memberships for meditation/mindfulness, therapy/coaching visits, financial planning, fertility and family building, maternity and newborn care, parenting and pediatrics, menopause care, breastmilk shipping, and caregiving support

• Learning: Free access to Udemy and Udemy Business plus a yearly stipend to spend on professional development

• Charitable Giving: Corporate charitable match for eligible nonprofits and charities

• Holidays: 15 days of approved leave if the length of service is 2 months in the first year; 21 days of annual leave if the length of term is between 1 and 3 years; 26 days of annual leave if the length of term is more than 3 years (i.e. 26 days for every year after the end of 4 years of service)

Information regarding data privacy is available within the Udemy Careers Privacy Notice.