Applied Scientist, Marketplace

Salary: Not specified Location Type: Not specified Employment Type: Not specified

Position Overview

Thumbtack is the essential app for home care and improvement, offering personalized guidance, AI tools, and a seamless hiring experience. We connect millions of homeowners with a community of over 300,000 local service businesses for everything from urgent repairs to major renovations. Join us if you're passionate about making an impact and building the future of home services.

About the Applied Science Team

Our team is dedicated to creating new product initiatives that balance supply and demand within our marketplace. We focus on acquiring, retaining, and enabling the success of our larger professional partners, particularly high-capacity, licensed professionals looking to grow with Thumbtack. We utilize machine learning, causal inference, and optimization techniques to strategically manage our professional base. Our work is critical for meeting demand projections, securing strategic partnerships, and enhancing the overall customer and platform experience by ensuring a robust supply of high-quality professionals. We tackle complex challenges at the intersection of marketplace dynamics, supply chain optimization, and behavioral modeling.

The Challenge

Thumbtack is committed to balancing marketplace supply and demand while maintaining a high standard of quality. Our current strategic focus includes expanding our base of larger professional partners. Supply gaps can impede strategic partnerships and revenue growth, especially in high-demand markets. Our Pro Optimization and Pro Success teams develop and implement data-driven strategies to identify, attract, and nurture these key supply segments. This involves addressing challenges such as forecasting supply needs, optimizing acquisition channels, integrating with external systems (FSMs/CRMs), and evolving marketplace mechanics (matching, ranking) to effectively serve large professionals. We need to build sophisticated models to understand and influence professional behavior, identify high-potential professionals, and adapt to market dynamics to ensure a healthy and balanced marketplace.

Responsibilities

• Initiate and drive applied science initiatives to completion, focusing on improving the acquisition, retention, and expansion of large professionals on the Thumbtack platform.
• Develop, deploy, and optimize machine learning models and algorithms for various supply shaping problems, including:
  • Targeted large professional acquisition and lead scoring.
  • Professional retention and churn prediction for high-value segments.
  • Optimization of professional expansion (e.g., category, geo, budget).
  • Enabling new features for marketplace matching and ranking algorithms specifically for large and licensed professionals.
  • Leveraging external data (e.g., credentialing databases) for professional quality assessment and targeting.
• Design and execute marketplace experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of new models, features, and strategies on key supply and business metrics.
• Analyze a wide variety of data, including marketplace interactions, professional profiles, financial data, and external data sources, to identify trends, opportunities, and risks related to supply health.
• Collaborate closely with engineering, product management, business development, and marketing teams to define problems, develop end-to-end solutions, and ensure successful implementation and monitoring of machine learning systems in production.
• Maintain the right balance between speed of execution and scientific rigor when designing solutions for a fast-paced marketplace environment.
• Contribute to improving the overall performance and robustness of supply shaping models by exploring new features, algorithms, and data sources.

Requirements

• Expert kn... (Information truncated)