DATA SCIENTIST

HFF’s Board and Executive Committee identifies digitalization (leveraging data, analytics & cloud) as a key strategic initiative. This position will be part of the newly formed department, reporting directly to Managing Director of Digital and Data Science. Our ideal data scientists are quick learners who leverage business acumen and human intuition to interpret implicit signals in datasets that open source deep learning platforms & machine learning packages use.

Main Responsibilities

• Identify opportunities for differentiating digital and data science capabilities, and assist department head with managing data science vendors and resources.

• Translate business needs into data science problems and technical approaches that yield actionable insights, and tell the story to senior leaders, including CIO and department heads.

• Retrieve, prepare, and process data from various sources (e.g. internal & external, structured & unstructured, online & offline).

• Conduct predictive analytics using advanced statistical and mathematical methods from statistics, machine learning, data mining, econometrics, and operations research.

• Build advanced analytical models to help solve business problems in areas of customer segmentation, purchase propensity, and personalization through recommendation engine (aka recommender system).

• Perform Statistical Natural Language Processing (NLP) to mine unstructured data, using methods such as document clustering, topic analysis, named entity recognition, and sentiment analysis.

• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to drive business results through implementing predictive insights of advanced analytics.

Experience / Skills Required :

• Proficiency in analysis packages (e.g. R) and programming languages (e.g. Python, Java, Scala).

• Experience with NLP toolkits such as NLTK, OpenNLP, Stanford CoreNLP etc.

• Experience with data visualization tools to tell the story.

• Strong written and oral communications, a can-do attitude and the willingness to tackle hard problems in innovative ways.

• Experience in designing/developing large-scale recommendation systems in production is a strong plus.

• Experiences working in the industries of financial services and/or commercial real estate preferred.

• Experiences with AWS and/or Microsoft Azure preferred.

Education

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Statistics, Mathematics, Engineering, Econometrics, or related fields.

• Master’s Degree (including MBA) preferred

HFF is an equal opportunity employer and affords equal opportunity to all applicants for all positions without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, age, handicap or disability, genetic information, membership or service in the U.S. Armed Forces, or any other characteristic protected by law.