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Research Scientist, Skill Rating and Player Matching

About Skillz:

Skillz is the leading mobile games platform connecting players in fair, fun, and meaningful competition.

The gaming industry is larger than movies, music, and books, with more than 2.7 billion gamers playing monthly and 10 million developers worldwide. Mobile is the fastest-growing segment of the gaming market, expected to increase from $86 billion last year to $161 billion in 2025.

As the first publicly-traded (NYSE: SKLZ) mobile esports platform, Skillz has pioneered the future of the gaming industry. The Skillz platform helps developers build multi-million dollar franchises by enabling social competition in their games. Leveraging its patented technology, Skillz hosts billions of casual esports tournaments for millions of mobile players worldwide, and distributes millions in prizes each month.

Through its philanthropic initiatives, Skillz has harnessed the power of its platform to transform the way nonprofits engage with donors, enabling anyone with a mobile device to support causes such as the American Red Cross, Susan G. Komen, American Cancer Society, and NAACP by playing in Skillz tournaments.

Skillz has also earned recognition as one of San Francisco Business Times’ Best Places to Work, Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, Parity.org’s Best Companies for Women to Advance, a two-time winner of CNBC’s Disruptor 50, one of Forbes’ Next Billion-Dollar Startups, and the #1 fastest-growing company in America on the Inc. 5000.

What we're looking for:

The Research Scientist, Skill Rating and Player Matching will spearhead the development of a cutting edge Player Skill Rating and Matching system that can be implemented in a real world, commercial setting. This system must achieve unmatched performance and player experience for any player in any game type and in any game mode in real time. This means that the system must optimally balance match quality and queue time in both asynchronous and synchronous games and both head-to-head and multi-player tournaments all the while satisfying the latency requirements of a large scale, real time platform. To do this, you will analyze system short-comings and areas of opportunities in current state-of-the-art systems, lead the development of algorithmic improvements and define the path to production for these next generation algorithms. You will work in a hybrid, fast-paced organization where scientists and engineers work jointly together and drive improvements directly to production.

The Research Scientist, Skill Rating and Player Matching will help drive robust and automated solutions, building new algorithms and processes capable of working on production-scale data and achieving automated adaptation of processes and algorithms to new game types and modes. You will also help integrate new algorithms and processes into existing modeling stacks, simplify and streamline the existing modeling stacks, and develop testing and evaluation strategies.

Your Skillz:

• Graduate degree (MS or PhD) in Electrical Engineering, Computer Sciences, or Mathematics with at least 7 years of related work experience
• Domain expertise in player skill rating and matching
• Solid, applied knowledge of statistical and machine learning techniques, scientific thinking, and the ability to invent

Bonus:

• Strong publication record
• Experience working effectively with science, data processing, and software engineering teams
• Proven track record of innovation and advancing the state of the art in rating and matchmaking
• Entrepreneurial spirit combined with strong problem solving skills
• Excellent written and spoken communication skills