Staff Data Scientist - Quora (Remote)

Quora

7d•$144,320 - $240,092•Remote

About The Position

Quora is a remote-first company with a mission to grow the world's collective intelligence through its platforms, Quora and Poe. Quora is a global knowledge-sharing platform with over 300 million monthly unique visitors, and Poe is a platform for interacting with AI language models. The company fosters a culture of transparency, idea-sharing, and experimentation. This specific role will focus on the Quora product. The Data Team at Quora is empowered to influence product and company strategy, with a strong emphasis on data and empiricism. The team balances rigor and pragmatism, seeking scrappy solutions to achieve the company's mission. Data scientists collaborate closely with product managers, designers, engineers, and other cross-functional partners to define metrics, design experiments, build visualizations, and identify usage patterns and opportunities. The role offers ample room for exploration and creativity due to Quora's rich data. Data scientists work across various domains including user growth, content quality, monetization, personalization, marketplace dynamics, and long-term company strategy. Example projects involve modeling growth, improving feed relevance, analyzing user engagement, optimizing marketplace efficiency, and evaluating monetization initiatives.

Requirements

Availability for meetings and impromptu communication during Quora's “coordination hours" (Mon-Fri: 9am-3pm Pacific Time)
7+ years work experience in an analytical or quantitative role, including 5+ as a Data Scientist or similar title, with a track record of success at a senior or staff level of scope and autonomy
Demonstrated ability to tackle difficult data questions that few others could have taken on, such as those requiring deep ownership of a product area and/or leading cross-functional and cross-team efforts
Expertise with statistical techniques (e.g. regression, hypothesis testing, causal inference) and their practical application
Experience mentoring other data scientists and raising team standards through best practices and process improvements
Effective communication skills, including the ability to translate ambiguous business needs into analytical questions and to explain technical results to executives and cross-functional partners
Extensive experience using a procedural programming language (e.g. Python, R) for data manipulation, modeling, and analysis; comfort working in a production codebase
Strong judgment that blends quantitative rigor with product intuition and common sense

Nice To Haves

2+ years of experience evaluating recommender systems in offline analysis and online experiments
Experience setting technical direction or strategy for a team or major workstream
Experience with large data sets and distributed computing tools (e.g. Presto/Trino)
Active Quora user with curiosity about the product

Responsibilities

Own ambiguous, high-impact problem spaces across product and business domains, from question framing, to devising and conducting the analysis, to developing and implementing solutions with cross-functional partners
Partner with cross-functional stakeholders and company leadership to shape product strategy and anticipate future challenges
Design and evaluate experiments to measure the impact of product and strategic changes
Analyze data from across the product to uncover root causes of metric movements
Develop tools, methodologies, and frameworks that help make both the data team and the company as a whole smarter about data
Multiply the impact of other data scientists through mentorship and instilling industry best practices across the team