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Data Scientist, Security

Are you motivated by keeping products used by hundreds of millions of people safe and secure from abuse? Can you tame huge amounts of highly technical security data? Would you enjoy securing the next generation of planet scale AR games through objective and deeply investigated analysis? We're looking for a data scientist to help improve Niantic's anti-cheat, fraud prevention, and game security capabilities as part of our broader security team.

You'll craft and communicate detailed analyses on specific usage patterns and suspected attack vectors to guide our efforts. You'll also build scalable analysis workflows and dashboards for automatically identifying suspicious behavior in our games and explore ML solutions. For this you'll be working closely with our existing data science team, and our engineering teams focussed on platform security. Together, you enable our product teams to deliver end-to-end solutions to catch bad actors and keep Niantic's products fun and safe for everyone. We seek creative engineers with excellent technical judgment, strong interpersonal skills, and an eagerness to explore the unknown.

Responsibilities

• Analyze and identify abuse and security anomalies by crafting and maintaining analysis workflows that can process large amounts of production security data.
• Write queries, dataflows, and transformations which extract insights and bring order to complex data sets.
• Setup dashboards and monitoring alerts to quantify and observe abusive activity and subsequently write detailed analysis reports about specific attacks and activities.
• Translate findings into concrete steps for the client and server game security teams to integrate into our products.
• Work with groups across the company to report insights and improve our understanding of cheating behavior.

Qualifications

• MS or PhD in a technical or quantitative analysis field including statistics, economics, natural sciences or engineering, or equivalent experience.
• Security/adversarial experience, paired with a passion and enthusiasm to help secure our games!
• Knowledge of operating with data at cloud scales with distributed storage systems such as BigQuery or Presto is helpful.
• Advanced knowledge of SQL - you should be able to write complex queries in your sleep and you're excited by working hands-on with data.
• At least 3 years of experience performing modeling and statistics with a working statistical analysis language such as Python or R is required.
• Experience with BI, dashboarding, and visualization tools (e.g. Tableau, Looker, Periscope, Grafana).
• Proficient in Python or Java or Scala or Go.

Plus If

• Proficient in ML models for classification, regression, and clustering; experience with deep learning models.
• Experience working with machine learning frameworks such as TensorFlow, Caffe2, PyTorch, MXNet, Spark ML, scikit-learn, or related frameworks.
• Experience with large scale data processing pipelines (e.g. Spark, Hive, DataFlow/Beam, Hadoop). Flexible with tools and ability to learn new technologies quickly.
• Familiarity with developing and maintaining deep learning architectures associated with CNNs, GANs and related algorithms.

Join the Niantic team!

Niantic is the world’s leading AR technology company, sparking creative and engaging journeys in the real world. Our products inspire outdoor exploration, exercise, and meaningful social interaction.

Originally formed at Google in 2011, we became an independent company in 2015 with a strong group of investors including Nintendo, The Pokémon Company, and Alsop Louie Partners. Our current consumer titles include pioneering global-control game Ingress, record-breaking AR game Pokémon GO, and Pikmin Bloom. In November 2021, we launched our developer platform, Lightship, enabling creators to build immersive AR experiences around the globe.

Niantic is an Equal Opportunity employer. We believe that cultivating a workplace where our people are supported and included is essential to creating great products our community will love. Our mission emphasizes seeking and hiring diverse voices, including those who are traditionally underrepresented in the technology industry, and we consider this to be one of the most important values we hold close.

We're a hard-working, fun, and exciting group who value intellectual curiosity and a passion for problem-solving! We have growing offices located in San Francisco, Sunnyvale, Bellevue, Los Angeles, New York, London, Tokyo, Hamburg, and Zurich.