About Skillz

Skillz is the leading mobile games platform connecting players in fair, fun, and meaningful competition.

The gaming industry is larger than movies, music, and books, with more than 2.7 billion gamers playing monthly and 10 million developers worldwide. Mobile is the fastest-growing segment of the gaming market, expected to increase from $68 billion in 2019 to $150 billion in 2025.

Skillz is pioneering the competitive mobile gaming experience, leveraging its patented technology to power over two billion esports tournaments a year. The company is headquartered in San Francisco and backed by leading venture capitalists, media companies, and professional sports leagues and franchises.

Through its philanthropic initiatives, Skillz has harnessed the power of its platform to transform the way nonprofits engage with donors, enabling anyone with a mobile device to support causes such as the American Red Cross, Susan G. Komen, American Cancer Society, and NAACP by playing in Skillz tournaments.

Skillz has also earned recognition as one of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, a two-time winner of CNBC’s Disruptor 50, one of Forbes’ Next Billion-Dollar Startups, and the #1 fastest-growing company in America on the Inc. 5000.

Who We’re Looking For

You’re ready to take the next step in your Data Science career - to a fast-moving, successful company building out their world class competitive platform! You’re passionate about data and finding patterns and insights that others often overlook. You’re looking to have a big impact on a small team. You’re oozing with curiosity and want to find new and novel ways to leverage your current skill set. You’re an excellent communicator and know that you grow faster from being able to mentor others.

What You’ll Do

Implement models for a variety of use cases, ranging from player matching to forecasting to fraud and cheat detection
Plan and estimate research projects for the team on a weekly, monthly, and quarterly cadence
Communicate your findings to a larger business audience
Mentor more junior team members and be a voice of statistical rigor across the entire organization as you grow your leadership skills
Collaborate with other engineering teams to have your algorithms implemented in production

Your Skillz

Basic Qualifications

Experience delivering ML projects end to end in an enterprise setting, including articulating the business use case; cleaning and exploring the data; and building, testing, and deploying predictive models
Pragmatic thinker whose primary aim is to build effective solutions that positively impact the business
Demonstrated experience delivering value to business stakeholders using Data Science techniques
Solid, applied understanding of both Machine Learning and Statistics along with a desire to deepen this understanding
Strong cross-functional, communication skills that help simplify and move complex problems forward with business partners
5+ years programming experience (Python, R or any other relevant language)
5+ years of relevant experience in building large scale machine learning or deep learning models and/or systems
3+ years experience using SQL
Excellent at breaking down complicated tasks and delegating the work to others while still ensuring quality
Experience mentoring more junior team members
Comfortable working in a fast paced, highly collaborative, dynamic work environment
M.S. in a quantitative field

Bonus

Ph.D. in a quantitative field
Experience in AWS or some other cloud provider
Experience with Spark and large-scale data analysis
Hands on experience building models with deep learning frameworks

Skillz embraces diversity and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. As part of our commitment to diversifying our workforce, we do not discriminate on the basis of age, race, sex, gender, gender identity, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, marital status, citizenship, veteran status, or disability status, and we operate in compliance with the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance.