Our data scientists help design models and analyses that influence all aspects of our business. We mostly use Python, and our data scientists tend to spend a lot of time sitting in front of Jupyter notebooks, digging through our football data to look for new insights and new ways to improve our models.
Our data scientists get to work on a wide variety of projects - to help with everything from predicting games, to assessing players, to helping people in other departments make smarter, evidence based decisions. To be a data scientist at Football Radar, you don’t need a depth of technical expertise in any one area, but you do need a breadth of knowledge, to have a sense of what’s possible. For example: you don’t need to memorise how to calculate partial derivatives to perform backpropagation in a neural network; but you probably want to know a little bit about deep learning at a high level, and where it is and isn’t useful. The role involves making pragmatic and sensible choices about what data analysis and modelling approaches to use, and then being able to effectively communicate your results – typically in writing, and often to a less technical audience.
Over the years, we have realised that for our data science projects to succeed, we need to be able to give data scientists a lot of autonomy. A lot of our data science work is research, and sometimes we don’t even know which destination we’re trying to reach – we may just spot something interesting, a little quirk that we don’t really understand, and we start pulling on that thread to see where it leads. We have found that for these kinds of projects, it’s not usually possible to agree a detailed plan in advance – it’s only by working on the problem directly that we can start to learn more about it, and decide what direction to take it in.
Benefits
- Freedom and autonomy in your work
- Competitive salary that is reviewed regularly, with an annual bonus option
- Competitive contribution match pension
- Choice of your own development kit
- Paid learning and development opportunities
- Fully subsidised private medical insurance + on-site health checks
- Subsidised gym membership
- Subsidised office meals
- Ongoing intellectual challenges