Data Mining Researcher, Microsoft Ads Platform

Company: Microsoft
Location: Bellevue, WA
Web: www.microsoft.com

Are you excited about working in the conflux of business, economics and technology? Are you are interested in analyzing lots of data and complex theoretical models to solve real problems? Do you like collaborating with the world's foremost scientists, engineers, and economists? The AdCenter Marketplace team mission is to understand, optimize and protect the health of the Microsoft Search Ads Marketplace. Our team is looking for people like you.

The Marketplace team informs both the day to day business operations and the long-term strategy of the advertising platform. This team works with engineering, business management, strategy, and executive decision makers. We have a wealth of data, ranging from user interaction logs to advertiser bidding behavior, from publisher policies to system performance. The Marketplace Team is hiring extremely talented, highly motivated and creative individuals with expertise in the areas of analytics, statistics, econometrics, machine learning, and data mining.

The team develops and applies advanced techniques to turn our petabytes of data into insights and action. As an analyst for the marketplace team, you will use data to understand and optimize the marketplace for users, advertisers and publishers as well as design mechanisms and policies to protect the health of the marketplace. Some examples of the challenges we face: Understanding how users interact with different search features and how that effects the monetization; understanding user intent and utility derived from advertisements; detecting and filtering malicious advertisers and bot traffic; measuring user, advertiser and publisher utility; analyzing the results of extremely large-scale experiments; what competitive gaps do we have and where can we affect strategy to get ahead of market trends.

The work you do will impact on millions of users and advertisers and the insights you discover will drive data-driven decisions for Microsoft's next multi-billion dollar business.

Responsibilities:

• Define, analyze, and report on key business and technology metrics
• Perform ad-hoc analysis to predict, measure, and interpret business trends and inform key decisions
• Perform analysis to support critical decisions on business strategies and new projects
• Work with researchers, engineers, and other analysts to identify opportunities
• Research and design experiments to answer target questions, evaluate different algorithms' real impact on advertising business
• Research new ways for modeling different advertising business models
• Research and exploration in the areas of statistics, experimental design, and operational research
• Research and analyze algorithms and methods for optimizing ad relevance and revenue

• Experience in data mining, machine learning, statistics, experimental design, optimization
• Experience in extracting and manipulating extremely large datasets
• Demonstrated ability to apply statistical techniques to solve real problems
• Experience with data analysis and statistical tools (e.g. R, STATA, SAS, or SPSS).
• Superior communications skills, both verbal and written
• Advanced degree in data mining, statistics, operations research, math, physics, economics
• Ability to work independently and in a team to research innovative solutions to challenging business/technical problems
• Attention to detail and data accuracy
• Proficiency with databases and scripting languages

_Contact_:
In order to be considered for this position, you must apply online via our career site

If you have questions about this position, please contact me at gregcool@microsoft.com. Resumes received via email cannot be considered until you formally apply online.