What is it like to be Data Scientist at a Big Tech Company?
In a large-scale company that operates a service with hundreds of millions of clients or users, data is vital to constructing feedback loops and informing business strategy. A firm as large as Netflix or Google collects enormous amounts of data pertaining to everything from daily active users to advertisement conversion rate.
But what is it like to work as a data scientist at a Big Tech company and what do you do on a day-to-day basis?
Responsibilities and Day-to-Day Work
1. Collecting and Cleaning Data
Data is your bread and butter. You’re on the front lines of data collection and curation.
While not the most glamorous part of the job, fine-tuning the data collection pipeline and building new data sets is crucial to downstream efforts. This might include normalizing data, throwing away outliers, making sure a sampling method is unbiased, and looking for new sources of data.
2. Monitoring Business Metrics
As a data scientist, part of your job is to monitor key metrics like daily viewership to make sure they are consistent from day-to-day and lie within an expected range. You might have to work together with team members to…
