Data Science Team Lead

Role: Data Science Team Lead

Reports to: CTO (Chief Technology Officer)

Location: New York City (Hybrid)

Standard Workday: U.S. East Coast hours

About sparks & honey

sparks & honey is a cultural consultancy on a journey to set a new standard in strategy and transformation. As a consultancy, we are defined by our focus on culture and the development of technology that allows us to understand and measure the forces shaping society in real-time. We work with global Fortune 500 companies, NGOs, Government organizations, and high growth startups. In each instance providing strategies designed to envision future scenarios with tangible steps to make them a reality.

Our values:

• Curiosity: We are radical explorers in pursuit of lifelong learning.

• Resilience: Adversity is a springboard for growth.

• Adaptability: Embracing change is both an opportunity and a necessity.

• Courage: Challenging what’s comfortable drives us forward.

• Humanity: Bringing the real you makes for the best version of us.

About the Role: sparks & honey uses our SaaS platform Q (https://q.sparksandhoney.com/) to drive research and client deliverables. The individual would be part of the Product Engineering Team, which builds, extends, and maintains this platform. The team will consist of a Lead Developer, two Front-End Developers (Senior SWE), and one Back-End Developer (Senior SWE).

The ideal candidate: You are a data scientist adept at programming and seeking to automate your work, so your work can be part of a live application. You are expected to contribute towards all Back-End and data-pipeline activities required to build, extend, and support our existing and future ML models. You are also expected to own and lead the full lifecycle of our data science stack and pipeline. While not fully comprehensive, below are areas of focus likely to be the core of responsibilities. You welcome on-the-job training and are willing to learn and grow in the role. We favor candidates open to managing team members to accomplish big goals.

Your Areas of Focus

Teamwork

• Willingness to work independently and unsupervised with Software Engineers, Product Managers, Designers, QA, DevOps, and Business Stakeholders (e.g., CEO, COO, CMO, Customer Success)

• Ability to work for major time chunks during the Standard Work Day in a team setting with shared screens and cameras

• Ability to work real-time on MS Teams during workday

• Ability to perform code review on GitHub for peer work review

• Ability to issue Pull Requests on Git to push one’s work to the next stage

• Ability to work actively with Front-End and Back-End developers to co-develop backend routes which will then be used on own work

• Ability to live-code and live-fix small issues in active working sessions working alongside Product Managers

Tooling

• Ability to work with specified tools: JIRA, GitHub, MS Teams

• Ability to work with Git branches

• Ability to merge Git branches

• Data Science Skills

• Ability to train models, both Classical and Deep Learning

• Ability to use external ML/AI tools, both via applications and APIs. This includes both inference and fine-tuning

• Ability to work with GenAI tools such as LangChain and customize as required

• Ability to direct the efforts of a team of engineers towards Data Science goals

• Ability to work with embeddings, dimensionality reduction, and similarity measures using embeddings/Lucene DBs (e.g., Pinecone, OpenSearch/Elastic)

• Ability to take minimally defined Product Requirements and translate them into DS models and inference systems

• Ability to work with and support time series models (e.g., Facebook prophet)

• Ability to work with other Leads and estimate Level of Effort for multi-day tasks

Data

• Ability to work with large datasets (we have ~400M records in five environments)

• Ability to write multithreaded scripts for statistics and machine learning

• Ability to lead Exploratory Data Analysis using SQL, ETL, Redshift and various AWS Products

• Back End Skills

• Ability to write backend routes in Python (Flask, FastAPI, etc.) for Data Science automation with minimal guidance

• Ability to write automated tests for all data science backend code using pytest

• Ability to write clean documentation for the DS backend using swagger/OAS

• Ability to read, write, and update SQL statements to support data science work

• Ability to read documentation and create client scripts against other/external APIs, ability to chain APIs

Software Engineering Skills

• Ability to work on a daily release cycle with daily commits, daily builds, daily PRs, and daily code review of peers’ work (back-end and data engineering scripts)

• Ability to use s&h’s standard frameworks without divergence or re-work

• Ability to maintain and extend large existing codebases

• Ability to push back against specific parts of PRDs which are likely to create unreasonable complexity and/or require unreasonable effort

• Ability to troubleshoot issues using documentation, StackOverflow, Reddit, and all available Q&A sources

Application Architecture & Setup

• Ability to work with existing Docker containers, containerized applications

• Ability to work equally well on both local and cloud environments

• Ability to create containerize existing Data Science applications from scratch

• Ability to work within existing architectures and frameworks

Environments

• Ability to work in a LINUX environment, especially on the cloud

• Ability to work within major AWS products (Lambda, EC2, serverless, s3, RDS, Elastic/OpenSearch)

• Production Support

• Willingness to be available as required for emergency Production Support for Data Science Model Failures

• Willingness to monitor multiple Teams channels throughout the day and react to issues that might arise as a result of own work, research, and respond with potential root causes for Model issues

The salary range for this role, based in New York, is generally $95,000 to $165,000, and we continually review ranges to address skills, experience and markets. Base salaries are determined during our interview process, by assessing a number of factors that include, but aren’t limited to, a candidate’s experience and skills relative to the scope and responsibilities of the position.

We are proud to be an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer and committed to leveraging the diverse backgrounds, perspectives, and experience of our workforce to create opportunities for our colleagues and our business. We do not discriminate in employment decisions on the basis of any protected category.

Omnicom will never ask for money up front and will not use apps such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp or Google Hangouts for communicating with you. You should be very wary of, and carefully scrutinize, any job opportunity that asks for money prior to starting and/or one where all communications take place exclusively via chat. We are proud to be an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer and committed to leveraging the diverse backgrounds, perspectives, and experience of our workforce to create opportunities for our colleagues and our business. We do not discriminate in employment decisions on the basis of any protected category