Data Science Lead, Algorithms

Why Deliveroo?

When you first think about Deliveroo, you probably think of getting great food to your house in less than half an hour.  Awesome right? But behind the scenes is the real story. This story is one of high growth, huge challenges and an enormous opportunity ahead of us. It began with our founder Will, arriving in London over 5 years ago and finding it almost impossible to order great food, despite the wealth of incredible restaurants in the city.  Fast forward 5 years and we operate in 13 countries with over 50,000 riders who deliver orders from 50,000 restaurants in over 200 cities worldwide.

We want to be the definitive food company - the app you go to any time you have a hunger pang. We are transforming the way people think about food. We are providing people with limitless access to different cuisines and restaurants, turning cooking from a chore to a choice, and giving people the freedom to eat what they want, when they want, where they want it.

We work with riders, restaurants and consumers. We operate one of the most complex three sided marketplaces in the world and we do this in real time. Millions of customers and thousands of restaurants and riders rely on us to match them within milliseconds. The algorithms behind that marketplace are the secret sauce that allow us to deliver our orders in under 30 minutes.

And we’re just getting started

The scale of the opportunity ahead of us is immense. The global food market is valued at £7.7 trillion but only 1% of it is currently online. Contrast that with the digital disruption of countless other industries - from banking and travel to retail and communications - it’s clear that our journey in the food sector has only just begun.

We are already a multi-billion dollar company that is more than doubling in size every year.  Deliveroo came top in the FT’s’ list of Europe’s fastest growing 1000 companies in 2018, and we were the first company ever to win Deloitte’s ‘UK Top 50’ two years in a row. Yet most of the extraordinary value this company will generate lies ahead of us.

As an Algorithms Data Scientist Lead at Deliveroo, you will:

* Bring extensive industry experience to bear on helping steer teams toward the most impactful scientific work
* Be a force multiplier: mentor and support teammates who have recently left academia and are new to industry
* Care about impact, and constantly seek out the necessary conversations to ensure that you build the right algorithm at the right time.
* Bring a combination of mathematical and scientific rigor, entrepreneurial thinking, and a hunger to build intelligent machines that drive the company forward
* Translate unstructured, complex business problems into practical, powerful algorithmic solutions
* Design, execute, and analyze live experiments to test what you build
* Work closely with engineers, product managers, and designers

Some examples of the problems you might tackle in your new role:

* Solve dynamic, stochastic routing problems whose complexity is at or beyond the cutting edge of current theory
* Effectively combine routing algorithms with demand forecasting models, rider availability models, and restaurant scheduling models
* Effectively and automatically nudge riders to maximize their earnings while providing a delightful service to our customers
* Dynamically price our service
* Help customers discover great new restaurants that will delight them personally
* Target CRM and restaurant marketing campaigns to the customers that will find them most relevant

Deliveroo is a data-driven organization: The algorithms you develop will be A/B tested quickly and rigorously and you will have direct, measurable impact to the bottom line.  

Qualifications:

* Significant industry experience since the completion of your academic career (~5+ years).
* Masters degree or PhD (PhD preferred) in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Statistics, Operations Research, Mathematics, Econometrics, or other quantitative field.
* Proven track record of building effective algorithms at industry scale.
* Extensive experience with regression and classification modeling in a prediction/control setting, and strong grasp of the associated concepts.
* Experience with integer optimization, time series modeling, recommender systems, and experiment design are all useful.

Life at Deliveroo

We are a growing team, with very large impact, seeking to answer some of the most interesting questions out there. We move fast, we’re always looking for new ideas and we’re very transparent about the decisions we make and why we make them.

There are so many questions we need to answer and plenty more we haven’t even encountered. How do data and technology help restaurants to grow as consumer habits change? How can we predict what someone wants to order for dinner long before the idea has even crossed their mind? At Deliveroo these are just some of the tough problems we are solving - and there is no challenge that cannot be yours....