Jobs

Are you looking for an extraordinary opportunity to add value directly to the bottom line of a multi-billion dollar Internet retailer? Do you want to dazzle your friends at your next cocktail party with tales of your fascinating job in the exhilarating travel and leisure industry? Are you tired of reading job descriptions that equate being a statistician to a boring job? Are you looking to apply your mathematical and analytic talents in a creative and innovative way?

Our Customer Analytics team has a tremendous opportunity for a motivated and experienced technical modeler who is up for this challenge. This is your chance to be creative and drive innovation. With your technical skills you will have the opportunity to solve complex data modeling and revenue management problems while communicating to business owners and product development members. The Customer Analytics team focuses on the application of advanced analytic techniques (e.g., predictive modeling, data mining, optimization, etc.) to business problems across all lines of business at Expedia.

This position is not just a job change, it's a career move. We offer you challenging problems, a fun and fast-paced environment, intelligent co-workers, and the freedom to learn new things. The team is involved in system development of cutting-edge features that integrate with the live-site product.

You will work on projects such as...

• Internet Fraud - Develop sophisticated predictive models to apprehend online fraudsters; your models could even help the police bust up rings of criminals!
• Pricing - What should we charge our customers? To where? For what period of travel? And what are our competitors charging? You will help us answer these kinds of tough questions as we refine our pricing models.
• Recommendation Technology - Amazon does it; even your Tivo does it. Recommending things to customers that we know they might like to buy is an important way for us to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty, as well as increase revenue.
• Hypothesis Testing - Which works better: a feature that simplifies our homepage or a complicated feature that gives the user more control? We are constantly trying to improve our website, and your management of our in-house hypothesis testing system is crucial to highly visible "go / no-go" decisions.
• Marketing Analytics - Help us help you! Your models can allow us to better target our customer base with outbound offers and promotions by sending the right offer to the right person.

• Propose and lead innovative mathematical approaches to solving complex business problems, utilizing available research at your disposal.
• Perform analyses, statistical design, statistical coding, and model validation in support of business requirements.
• Generate statistical code that executes in an autonomous production environment and fully considers error handling, exception conditions, etc.
• Perform unit testing and model validation of statistical routines.
• Collaborate extensively with stakeholders, program management, and software development team members to ensure that solutions meet business needs, permit valid inferences, and have functional implementability.
• Document the technical details of your work to improve collaboration with other team members.
• Guide and mentor other modelers in best practices regarding methodology, as well as implementation (proper documentation, source control, and coding practices).

• 8-10+ professional experience in a modeling or analyst role, someone with high energy and creativity and an openness to new ideas/approaches.
• Master's degree (Ph.D. preferred) in quantitative discipline such as statistics, economics, applied mathematics, quantitative methods, operations research, research methodology, etc. Comprehensive understanding of quantitative methods and extreme attention to detail.
• Previous experience in the e-commerce and/or travel/hospitality domain preferred.
• Strong proficiency in SAS and demonstrated ability to produce both ad hoc analyses and production-grade analytic jobs that execute autonomously.
• Functional proficiency in SQL.
• Experience in several of the following areas: predictive modeling (including ARIMA and regression techniques), neural nets and self-learning models, linear and non-linear optimization, etc.
• Ability to estimate required effort for project objectives and prioritize work items appropriately