This job might no longer be available.

Lead Data Scientist 3, Words with Friends

Zynga is a leading developer of the world’s most popular social games that are played by millions of people around the world each day. To-date, more than 1 billion people have played our games across Web and mobile, including Words With Friends, FarmVille, Zynga Poker, Merge Dragons, Empires & Puzzles, Hit it Rich! Slots and CSR.

Zynga’s data science and analytics team uses our unique and expansive data to model and predict user behavior, making our games more personalized and more fun to play! We strive for a better understanding of our players which translates into challenges and features that delight them and increased social engagement within our games.

Here’s where you would come in: identify and formalize problems to understand user behavior. Create systems and analyses to derive insights that change the studio’s world view. Be innovative, be creative, use every bit of that key commodity – data. Millions of people play Zynga games every day, so our data is tremendously rich and we have a lot of it!

We will rely on you to communicate your findings to your peers – both technical and non-technical. Your solutions to difficult problems will need to be demonstrably impactful, visual and maintainable. You will work with our game teams to put your models into production. You will collaborate with Product Managers, Game Designers, and Engineers to deliver business impact, changing current practices in line with new findings and insights.

Role Responsibilities:

• Work with large amounts of data to find opportunities to improve the experience that Zynga provides to its players
• Define analytics and data science roadmap, balancing actionable insights to substantially improve core game metrics
• Drive and empower game studio to make quantitatively informed, evidence based decisions
• Work closely with game team to design, test, verify and implement machine learning models with Zynga’s games that impact millions of users
• Design and evaluate novel scalable approaches to experimentation

Desired Skills and Experience:

• BS in Computer Science, Math, Statistics, Economics, or other quantitative field; Masters, MBA or PhD preferred
• 5+ years of work experience in data science or analytics roles
• Fluent in SQL; Strong experience with programming in Python and/or R; Adept in at least one visualization tool such as Tableau, or QlikView
• Demonstrated experience with some or all of the following: statistics, experimental design, machine learning, data mining, predictive modeling, deep learning
• Experience in analyzing large datasets, preferably in a Hadoop or Spark environment, and deploying production-ready systems at scale
• Strong written and oral communication skills
• Ability to work effectively in a fast-paced environment with changing priorities
• Ability to collaborate effectively with engineers, product managers, analysts, and marketing to deliver unambiguous business impact
• Strong passion for gaming!

What we offer you:

• Zynga Stock RSUs and Bonus Plan
• Full medical, dental, vision benefits as well as life insurance
• Catered lunch daily
• Generous Paid Maternity/Paternity leave
• Open vacation policy for many employees
• Flexible working hours on many teams
• Casual dress every single day
• Work with cool people!

Zynga is an equal opportunity employer. We are proud of our diverse community; we do not discriminate on the basis of race, sex, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, medical condition, disability, or any other class or characteristic protected by applicable law. We welcome candidates, players, employees, and partners from all backgrounds. Join us!

Zynga will consider for employment all qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with applicable law.