Applied Scientist, Marketplace

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Position Overview

Thumbtack is dedicated to helping millions of people confidently care for their homes. Our platform provides personalized guidance, AI tools, and a best-in-class hiring experience, connecting homeowners with a community of over 300,000 local service businesses. We are seeking an Applied Scientist to join our Applied Science Team, focusing on creating new product initiatives to balance supply and demand within our marketplace, with a particular emphasis on acquiring, retaining, and enabling the success of our larger professional partners.

About the Applied Science Team

The Applied Science Team is at the forefront of developing innovative solutions to address critical marketplace dynamics. We leverage machine learning, causal inference, and optimization techniques to strategically manage and grow our professional network. Our work directly impacts revenue growth, strategic partnerships, and overall customer experience by ensuring a robust and high-quality supply base. We tackle complex challenges at the intersection of marketplace dynamics, supply chain optimization, and behavior modeling.

The Challenge

Thumbtack faces the ongoing challenge of balancing marketplace supply and demand, maintaining a high bar for quality. Our strategic focus now includes expanding our engagement with larger professional partners. Supply gaps can impede strategic partnerships and revenue growth, especially in high-demand markets. The Pro Optimization and Pro Success teams are responsible for designing and implementing data-driven strategies to identify, attract, and nurture these critical supply segments. This involves forecasting supply needs, optimizing acquisition channels, integrating with external systems (like FSMs/CRMs), and evolving marketplace mechanics (matching, ranking) to effectively serve large professionals. We need to build sophisticated models that understand and influence professional behavior, identify high-potential professionals, and adapt to changing market dynamics.

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