What to Ask Yourself when Hiring a Data Scientist
In this special guest feature, Aria Haghighi, VP of Data Science at Amperity, discusses several important questions to ask yourself when hiring a data scientist. Hiring data scientists is hard. They’re hard to find since there are fewer trained than can meet demand, and it’s challenging to properly interview and vet them (especially the first in your organization). Aria is responsible for leading the company’s world-class data science team to expand core capabilities in identity resolution. He has more than 15 years of technology experience playing key advisory and leadership roles in both startup and enterprise companies. Most recently, Aria was Engineering Manager at Facebook where he was responsible for leading the Newsfeed Misinformation team, which uses machine learning and natural language processing to improve the integrity of content on the platform and tackle the prevalence of fake news, hoaxes, and misinformation. He has also held leadership and technical roles at some of the world’s biggest tech companies including Apple, Microsoft and Google.
Hiring data scientists is hard. They’re hard to find since there are fewer trained than can meet demand, and it’s challenging to properly interview and vet them (especially the first in your organization). These challenges have been written about in several places, but I’ve often found a different set of concerns that have been less discussed, that are at least as challenging.
What Kind of Data Scientist Should You Be Hiring?
Data science is a broad field, encompassing individuals who spend all of their time iterating on large-scale production machine learning systems to people who primarily do offline work and visualization. They can report up through to VP Engineering, VP Product, or their own organization (up to a VP Data Science or Chief Data Officer).
At the risk of oversimplifying, the two extremes types of data scientist that exist are:
To be clear, neither is a better choice than the other. I think the key question to ask is “how confident are you in the area you want to make a data science investment.” If you need someone to understand your organization and their first task is to figure out what investment will yield the best business value, you probably want a product-oriented data scientist.
