Senior Data Scientist (Research Statistician)

At Nielsen, we are passionate about our work to power a better media future for all people by providing powerful insights that drive client decisions and deliver extraordinary results. Our talented, global workforce is dedicated to capturing audience engagement with content - wherever and whenever it’s consumed. Together, we are proudly rooted in our deep legacy as we stand at the forefront of the media revolution. When you join Nielsen, you will join a dynamic team committed to excellence, perseverance, and the ambition to make an impact together. We champion you, because when you succeed, we do too. We enable your best to power our future.
Job Summary
The Senior Data Scientist position will support the statistical operations and methodological enhancement of our Television Audience Measurement product portfolio, using the right data, algorithms, and tools to ensure Nielsen clients receive a complete and representative view of how people watch media content. Make an immediate impact as we evolve our methodologies to fuel Nielsen’s overall strategy of transforming audience measurement, blending the strengths of high quality representative panel data with the scale of “big data” assets such as set top boxes and smart TVs.
In this role, you will have the opportunity to grow your foundational data science skills (statistical research, analytics, and coding) through all aspects of the data science workflow and data product lifecycle. You will draw on the core principles of statistical inference and total survey error as you conduct research and analyze data on topics that will enhance the utility of our data (project areas will include such topics as representation/sampling, bias reduction, trend analysis, indirect estimation, and sample weighting).
The ideal candidate will have a strong desire to understand all aspects of Nielsen data, grow their technical and statistical skills to facilitate reproducible research and analytics, and to understand our clients’ problems to ensure our data methodologies directly address and solve them. 

Responsibilities

• Learn and become an expert in US TV Audience Measurement, with a focus on data structures, computations, and sampling/weighting.
• Conduct research and analytics to ensure methodologies are fit for purpose and working as intended; troubleshoot, diagnose, and resolve when they are not.
• Independently write custom Python, PySpark and SQL code.
• Develop, implement and maintain good programming standards and practices across our data science and analytics codebase.
• Use GitLab and cloud development tools e.g. Databricks to foster data science and analytic reproducibility.
• Support analyses for Data Science teams including custom requests, client inquiries, impact of changing methodologies, standards and best practices.
• Examine analysis specifications for completeness, determine how to execute the analysis, modify specifications as needed, provide an estimated delivery date, and accurately deliver analyses on time with a summary of the key insights.
• Proactively gather information, as needed, to work independently as well as in a team environment.
• Key tasks include – but are not limited to – sample weighting, data integration, examining large volumes of data, identifying and explaining trends and/or discrepancies, and identifying methodological and process improvements.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s (preferred) degree in a quantitative research field, such as data science, statistics, survey research, biological/physical sciences, etc.
• 3-5 years research and analytic experience in a business setting.
• Outstanding statistical and analytical skills.
• Strong proficiency with Python, PySpark, SQL, GitLab, and AWS S3.
• Collaborative code development experience, including version control and code review.
• Excellent problem solving and critical thinking skills
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills.
• Excellent coding fundamentals.
• Excellent troubleshooting and debugging skills.
• Curiosity and skepticism

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