Applied Scientist, Machine Learning and Operations Research

About the Role

At Lyft, our purpose is to serve and connect. We aim to achieve this by cultivating a work environment where all team members belong and have the opportunity to thrive.

The Pricing team is a centerpiece of Lyft’s marketplace, determining prices for all rideshare products and supporting new initiatives. Dynamic Pricing & Offer Selection sits at the heart of Pricing, focused on determining optimal prices and ETAs in real-time and balancing supply and demand for our two-sided marketplace to drive both short-term and long-term conversion and retention.

As an Applied Scientist specializing in Machine Learning and Operations Research on this team, you will develop mathematical models and launch algorithms that power these key pricing and ETA decisions. You will leverage your skills to build ML and optimization models and productionalize pipelines that can scale to millions of calls per day while solving critical business problems that have a big impact on the marketplace and rider experience. You will get exposure to a diverse set of real-world problems across optimization, prediction, machine learning, and inference and collaborate closely with teammates and stakeholders across Pricing, from Product Managers to Engineers and Analysts.

We are looking for someone who is excited about working in a fast-paced, innovative, and impactful environment, and is adept at balancing complexity and efficiency to translate real world business problems into reliable solutions, systems and decision frameworks.

Responsibilities

• Partner with Data Scientists, Engineers, Product Managers, and Business Partners to frame problems mathematically and within the business context
• Write production quality code. Design, build and deploy production-grade ML and Optimization models. Able to build custom methods and tooling beyond off-the-shelf libraries.
• Perform data analysis and build proof-of-concepts to explore and propose ML and Optimization solutions to both new and existing problems.
• Evaluate machine learning systems against business goals. Collaborate with Engineers to implement algorithms in live systems and ensure the robustness of the systems
• Establish metrics and development measurement methodologies to monitor the health of our products, as well as the impacts on user and marketplace outcomes
• Drive collaboration and coordination with cross-functional teams

Experience

• M.S. or Ph.D. in Machine Learning, Operations Research, Statistics, Computer Science or other quantitative fields
• 2+ years of algorithms experience in a technology company setting
• Proficiency with Python and working in a production coding environment
• Passion for solving unstructured and non-standard mathematical problems and building impactful machine learning models leveraging expertise in one or multiple fields.
• Strong understanding of machine learning methodologies, with proven experience with building and evaluating optimization or machine learning models
• Strong verbal and written communication skills with a good track record of collaborating with others to solve a problem