Uber

Position Title/Short Description

Full Text of JOE Listing:

Uber is looking for economists with a passion for tackling hard problems with real-world impact. We are economists, statisticians, operations researchers, and computer scientists who combine theoretical insight with rigorous data analysis to improve the value created across Uber’s real-time marketplaces. Economists at Uber work on teams across the company in a variety of roles; we will match hires to roles best suiting their interests and abilities.

The Core Analytics & Science Team (CAS) is Uber's largest data science organization, covering both our main lines of business as well as the underlying platform technologies that power those businesses. We are a key part of Uber's cross-functional product development teams, helping to drive every stage of product development through data analytic, statistical, and algorithmic expertise.

Here are the teams that make it happen:
-Eats: Uber Eats is Uber's ambitious and rapidly growing on-demand food delivery business currently operating in over 45 countries globally. Eats is a 3-sided marketplace, comprising Eaters, Delivery Partners, and Restaurants and is the largest on-demand food delivery business outside of China. Data scientists on Eats with economics backgrounds work in a range of critical areas, from designing pricing algorithms that determine in real-time how much to offer Delivery Partners to do a trip, to questions around how delivery fees and subscriptions work together to shape long term eater behavior, our restaurant acquisition strategy, and which restaurants should be prioritized and offered discounts. Our algorithms operate globally at a scale of hundreds of thousands of restaurants, millions of delivery partners, tens of millions of eaters, and billions of dollars per year.

-Rides: The Rides business delivers Uber’s core ride-sharing experience. Economics is at the heart of the business model, and the team works at the center of strategic decisions and algorithmic solutions. We work on problems across a wide variety of fields including consumer behavior (e.g., estimating rider demand) and labor (e.g., understanding the market for Drivers) within the context of a dynamic marketplace (IO and mechanism design). Recent problems the team has worked on include: algorithmic improvements to our core pricing and matching algorithms, new incentive products for drivers, product experience shifts on both the rider and driver side that deeply affected marketplace equilibria, etc.

-Platform: Platform Data Science powers the technical foundations that power Uber's trip/order experiences globally and core decision making systems internally. Data Scientists solve problems tackling upfront pricing, promotions, and fare generation for Uber worldwide. They build large-scale real-time machine learning models to predict travel time and distance more accurately, optimize parameters to make upfront price experience better, and prevent defect trips for drivers using product innovations. Recently there has been an increased focus on using experimentation with customer support policy to drive customer engagement. The team’s work has a significant impact on the overall user experience of all Uber customers including eaters, riders, drivers, and restaurants globally.

What You'll Do
-Solve ambiguous, challenging business problems using data-driven approaches
-Work closely with multi-functional leads to develop a technical vision and drive team direction
-Establish standard methodologies for data science including modeling, coding, analytics, optimization, and experimentation
-Present findings to business leaders to inform decisions
-Design product experiments and interpret the results to draw detailed and impactful conclusions

Basic Qualifications
-Ph.D. degree in Economics or related field
-Proficiency with analytical tools like R/Python/Matlab/Stata/EViews

Preferred Qualifications
-Ability to think creatively and insightfully about business-relevant economic problems
-Familiarity with relational databases and SQL a plus
-Programming skills in C/C++/Java/Python/etc. (for product-focused roles)
-Experience in experimental design and analysis (e.g., A/B and market-level experiments), as well as causal inference
-Experience in algorithm development and prototyping