Machine Learning Engineer

What is Underdog?

Founded by a team of industry veterans, Underdog was born with the idea that bringing strategic innovation to sports gaming and entertainment is the key to success in an exceptionally competitive market. Underdog has quickly established itself as a leader in the space, and is committed to building the best sports gaming platform in the industry -- and supporting the most passionate community of sports fans while doing it!

At Underdog, we’re not only about creating these awesome products, but also about growing our culture of passion, ownership, and fun! We believe that great companies are made out of great people. Our continual aim is to create an inclusive environment for everyone, at all levels, to achieve their highest potential at work.

We are looking for intellectually curious, highly motivated individuals to be the foundational members of our Machine Learning Data Science team. As a Machine Learning Engineer, you’ll be building out the next-gen AI powered gaming platform that will lead the sports gaming industry. You will be part of a team whose focus is to solve cutting edge AI problems and deploy state-of-the-art models.

You will develop models, systems and features that leverage the massive scale of Underdog’s user base to understand and predict user behavior, as well as optimize the experience at all stages of the user journey. You will engage in and manage an end-to-end machine learning (ML) development lifecycle. This includes data, use case, solution design and modeling, production deployment, and monitoring. 

Projects can range from working on a wide-variety of machine learning and/or deep learning (DL) problems, e.g. segmentation/clustering, propensity modeling, classification, forecasting and prediction, fraud/anomaly detection, search and ranking, collaborative filtering/recommendation, natural language processing, and computer vision.

Please note, Underdog is a US based company and no sponsorship is available for this position at this time. 

What you’ll do:

• Design, explore, build, evaluate, deploy and iterate on large scale ML systems

• Perform model explainability analysis  

• Evaluate the performance of ML systems against business objectives

• Work with large scale data systems

• Set up and refine the ML tech stack, and build systems that help Underdog personalize their users’ experience

• Work with Product, Design, Infrastructure, and Frontend teams to bring your models, and features to life

• Contribute across the data science and ML development stack: ideation, opportunity sizing, prototyping, testing, and deployment

• Data Scientists will analyze data used by both our Sportsbook and Fantasy applications

Who you are:

• BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science, Mathematics, Statistics, or other quantitative fields or related academic/work experience

• 3+ years of experience building and deploying ML/DL models or systems

• Industry experience of applying scientific methods to solve real-world problems on consumer scale data

• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills. You thrive in ambiguous environments, get excited about finding solutions to complex problems, and then execute on them

• Ability to work autonomously and lead initiatives across multiple product areas and communicate findings with leadership and product teams

• Proven ML and software engineering skills across languages including Python, R, Swift etc.

• Experience with ML software tools and libraries (e.g., Scikit-learn, Keras, PyTorch, Huggingface, Haystack, Fastai, TensorFlow, Nvidia, Nbdev.)

• Experience with MLOps pipelines 

Even better if you have…

• MS, PhD in Computer Science or related field with research in machine learning

• Familiarity with large-scale data processing and distributed systems

• Experience with one or more of the following: statistics, causal inference, natural language processing, computer vision, bayesian reasoning, recommendation systems, search and ranking, learning from semistructured data, graph learning, reinforcement or active learning, ML software systems, machine learning on mobile devices

Underdog Sports is firmly committed to equity, inclusion, and diversity. Our unique culture was built on the foundation of a safe and inclusive environment for people of all backgrounds. We highly value the mental, physical, and emotional health of our employees, and are continuously asking ourselves: what can we do better? Underdog is an equal opportunity employer and doesn't discriminate on the basis of creed, race, sexual orientation, gender, age, disability status or any other defining characteristic. Our targeted compensation rate for this position is between $100,000 and $170,000 depending on experience, plus equity. Think your skills are exceptional and warrant higher pay? Apply anyway! If we agree, we're willing to negotiate. Below you’ll find a few of our perks:

• Unlimited PTO (we're extremely flexible with the exception of the first few weeks before & into the NFL season)

• 16 weeks of fully paid parental leave

• Company paid Health, Dental, Vision plan option for employees and dependents

• 401k Match & FSA

• Remote, In-Person, or Hybrid Scheduling – we are 100% VIRTUAL FIRST!

• A $500 home office allowance

• $100 in UD credit

• Support for learning and development

• Book club – expense your books!

• Monthly raffle to win a sports ticket reimbursement of up to $500 (including game day snacks!)

• Lastly, an extremely transparent, fun, and engaging culture where you will grow both personally and professionally!