Roblox is hiring a
Senior Scientist / Economist

About the Role:

WHY DATA SCIENCE & ANALYTICS?

The Data Science & Analytics organization's mission is to increase our speed, frequency and acumen of making decisions at scale by instilling a data-influenced approach to building products. We cover a wide area of the data spectrum including analytical data engineering, product analytics, causal inference, economics, statistical modeling and machine learning. Aligned and partnering with product verticals, we use this extensive toolbelt to discover new opportunities and unmet use cases, influence and shape the product roadmap and prioritization, build data products and measure impact on our community of players and developers.

WHY ECONOMY SCIENCE AT ROBLOX?

Our vision is to create the most vibrant UGC virtual economy. We currently operate the largest marketplace of virtual items, and are the platform that hosts tens of thousands of games and social experiences. We seek to enable and advance this existing economy with economic rigor, leveraging expertise from market design, auction theory, price theory, structural IO, and reduced form causal methods, built into our governance model, and directly incorporated in community tools. In addition, we face several macroeconomic questions around exchange rates, localized pricing, and vision for monetary policy.

Reporting to the Senior Director on the Economy DS team, you will contribute to designing and innovating the UGC virtual marketplace, and enable insights to advance developer monetization, through sales of developer products and game passes. You will be a part of the Economy Data Science & Analytics (DSA) team working in close partnership with leaders in Product, Engineering, and Finance. We are seeking a senior applied economist or scientist expert to help design this vision and execute the innovation to achieve it.

You are:

• Highly proficient in a specialized economics area: multi-sided platform economics, mechanism design, empirical industrial organization, or causal inference
• Experienced in applying economic theory to real marketplaces, deriving strategic insights, and advancing business objectives
• Proficient in data and applied methodologies. You use cutting-edge techniques (or develop new ones) to extract value and drive insights for strategic topics.
• A strong communicator. You understand that analysis must be presented in meaningful ways and lead spirited discussions about the findings. You can explain technical concepts to non-technical audiences and discuss appropriate tradeoffs.
• Passionate about developing other technical talent. You are motivated to share your expertise and develop other team members while leading your own space.
• Expert in data transformation and programming, and proficient in developing data pipelines through use of Spark, Hive, and Airflow

You Will:

• Advance data-informed decision-making using economic theory and scientific rigor
• Create and motivate metrics reflective of first-principles, and use them to advance user experience and marketplace health
• Accelerate product development through your understanding of the underlying data and your ability to partner with product and technical leaders to provide insights
• Design science roadmaps and experimentation agendas to determine the success of product feature launches
• Access raw data, then transform it, and analyze it in a compelling way - -all using a custom analytics tool kit built from state-of-the-art open-source libraries

You Have:

• PhD in Economics, Statistics, Applied Math, Physics, or other technical field
• 6+ years of industry or academic experience in data science, economics, analytics, or machine learning engineering
• 4+ years of experience using scripting languages (Python, R), and big data query/processing languages and tools such as SQL, Hive, Spark and Airflow
• Broader experience applying theory to advance marketplaces or platforms is a plus
• Experience in varied environments and track record of simplifying complex and ambiguous problem is a plus