About Us 

At WeWork, we provide inspiring and flexible workplace solutions to help businesses - small, medium or large - thrive in more than 150 cities globally. The future of work is happening right now, and we are leading this moment. United by a common purpose, here we will empower tomorrow’s world at work. Join us on our journey as we give our members the freedom and support to push boundaries in their industries, and work to redefine our own. 

About The Opportunity

Are you excited by the prospect of creating state-of-art algorithms to solve real world problems? Do you like to own end-to-end business problems/metrics that directly impact the profitability of the company? Areas we are working on are diverse and include NLP, Time-Series Analysis, Deep Learning, Reinforcement Learning, Recommender Systems and more. Come join a team of scientists who use machine learning and AI to help WeWork scale.

We are looking for a Director of Engineering & Applied Science, Workplace AI. 

What You’ll Do

You will build and lead the Engineering & Applied Science organization wholly focused on WeWork’s Workplace AI vertical. The primary objective for the Workplace AI vertical is to make WeWork’s data and insights a packageable, profitable product we can sell to third parties. Your team will be critical in selling space utilization data as a service and use it to power smarter workplace experiences. This will comprise a team of diverse, smart, and driven professionals across the Software Engineering, Data Engineering, Data Science and Machine Learning Engineering disciplines. We’re looking for a leader who can manage a team of modelers and engineers directly.

You will partner with product management, design leads  and other operating and infrastructure partner teams to build a high-value roadmap of innovation for the Workplace AI vertical. You will partner with recruiting to hire ML and data experts as well as other technical developers into your team. You will put mechanisms in place to ensure your organization delivers results. You will lead by example to build your organizational culture in keeping with WeWork’s culture. You will partner with other technical leads across the technology organization and guide resources with your technical expertise by contributing to design reviews and ideation. You will mentor, coach and grow people.

You will work with your team of ML engineers to innovate and build new models and systems, improve and enhance existing ML systems as well as discover new opportunities to apply machine learning to solve critical problems. Your responsibilities will include:

Technical direction and guidance: You will set a compelling technical vision and direction that commercializes WeWork’s data and presence / utilization insights. You will be the technical lead for Workplace AI to provide guidance and support to your teams. You will own responsibility for architecture and technical decisions within your team, including research thinking. You will own the standards for technical excellence, scalable and maintainable infrastructure, and machine learning product development. You will also identify, promote and support opportunities for IP development during the course of R&D for Workplace AI.

Recruitment: You will hire expert Computer Vision, ML modelers and engineers as well as other data and systems resources to grow your team.

Mentoring: You will mentor the professional development of each direct report through personal and performance management. You establish regular 1:1s with direct reports and craft individual improvement/goal plans with each direct report and ensure that they receive regular, documented feedback.

Planning / alignment: You will plan and collaborate with other dedicated Workplace AI resources and Workplace teams in WeWork Technology in delivering a data product vision. You will be responsible for designing the work required to research, implement, deploy and support these products as they support Workplace’s top-line goals.

Provide oversight: You will work with your team to understand how everything fits together, when ML is applicable and when it is not, and what are the risks. You will be accountable to the broader Workplace team to set and deliver milestones that have meaningful impact. You will be clear and transparent of how your team’s work impacts the overall Workplace initiative and evolves into a sellable product that moves the needle on WeWork’s overall financial performance.

Execution: You will help ensure your teams deliver projects on time and with high quality. You will balance short term and long term priorities. You will be focused on developing the foundations required for an executable machine-learning development and feedback loop, in addition to subsequently executing that loop. This includes defining the research roadmap and setting expectations on research deliverables.

Collaboration: You will build strong relationships with your customers and partners. You will be responsible for connecting your teams with the appropriate counterparts in Tech, or in other organizations, as needed to accomplish our goals, and maintaining those relationships proactively to support successful execution. You will productively resolve conflicts and ensure your teams collaborate with others to deliver the right results even when faced with differing opinions and  priorities.

Cross functional management: You will work closely with other teams from across Technology and the company to deliver the Workplace AI product which may involve multiple disciplines. You will also work with other leaders in the company to build upon the WeWork culture and ensure a healthy workplace environment. 

Minimum Qualifications

• M.Sc / PhD  in Statistics, Machine Learning, Computer Science, Operational Research, or in a highly quantitative field

• 5+ years of hands-on experience in predictive modeling, large data sets and related technologies

• 4+ years of management experience (mentoring junior engineers, setting technical direction, etc.).

• Expert level experience in Python 

• Experience developing and deploying Pytorch based DL models

• Experience developing and deploying distributed data systems into Kubernetes & GCP

• Deep understanding of advanced theoretical statistics

• Expertise in specialized areas such as  NLP, Probabilistic Inference, Machine Learning, Neural Nets, Information Retrieval, Recommendation Systems, Optimization.

• Good communication skills, ability to work with large cross-functional teams of technical and non-technical members.

• Proven track record of scaling teams by employing the industry best practices and been a proponent for inclusive diverse teams

Preferred Qualifications

• Strong organization and prioritization skills along with outstanding written and verbal communication skills

• Proven track record of getting teams to deliver successfully within aggressive timelines

• Effective manager of growing more leaders in the organization 

• Understanding Deep Learning methods

• Experience in Spark

• Experience in Beam

Life At WeWork

Being a WeWorker is more than just a job. We believe the magic of work is sparked by the passion you bring, the places you go, the people you meet and the purpose you follow. And it starts here. Here you will brush shoulders with those who dare to dream and do. Here you will be welcomed by a diverse community that embraces and inspires you—because together we can achieve more. Here we challenge ideas, and explore new ways of getting things done. Whether you are part of our Employee Community Groups, or part of a global project, we ask you to bring your open-minded attitude and collaborative spirit. In return, you will be part of a team where your unique perspectives are celebrated. 

WeWork is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity and Affirmative Action employer. We do not discriminate based upon gender, sexual orientation, marital or civil status, pregnancy (or pregnancy-related conditions), gender identity or expression, transgender status or gender reassignment, race, color, national origin or ancestry, citizenship, religion or religious beliefs, age, physical or mental disability, genetic information (including genetic testing and characteristics), military or veteran status, or any other grounds or characteristic that is protected under the law. 

As part of our commitment to health and safety, WeWork -- like a growing number of employers -- is requiring all U.S. employees to be fully vaccinated for COVID-19 as a condition of employment, absent a legal exception for reasonable accommodation.  We provide unvaccinated new hires a 45-day grace period after their start date to get fully vaccinated or, if eligible, obtain a reasonable accommodation.  If you believe that a legal exception may apply to you, please still apply for any role(s) you are interested in and, if you are hired, you will receive instructions on how to request a reasonable accommodation after your start date.  Please note that roles that require in-person work -- currently, within our Community (excluding Member Experience), Facilities Management (including Security), Sales (excluding Sales Ops), and Member Technology teams -- will not be eligible for work-from-home as an accommodation because it poses an undue hardship on our business.

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