Position Summary:



This individual will serve as technical leader for athenahealth’s data scientists focused on NLP and related projects.  Understanding and incorporating information within unstructured text has never been more important to our growth and success as a company.  Applications are numerous, impactful, and (objectively) fascinating:  understanding client sentiment and satisfaction, extracting clinical content from provider notes and patient health history, automating care management via chat interfaces, parsing and rectifying patient records across different EMRs, and more.

 

This is one of the fastest growing and important domains within Data Science.  You will set the team up for success, defining best practices, illustrating canonical methods, designing roadmaps for new NLP projects, and recommending the best technologies for the task at hand.

 

Keywords applicable to you include:  topic modeling, semantic analysis, sentiment analysis, text classification, text clustering, information extraction, entity mapping, terminology mapping, ontology learning, deep learning.

 

Responsibilities include but are not limited to:

45% [Primary Function] Technical Execution

• Identify opportunities for different NLP techniques and evaluate which are best
• Lead specification, design, and implementation of advanced analytics projects
• Stay abreast and evaluate the latest in analytics technologies and determine how to incorporate these into our data science best practices
• Understand and follow conventions and best practices for analysis, statistics, modeling, coding, and architecture; hold other members of the team accountable for doing so
• Develop and adhere to rigorous testing of statistics, models, and code
• Develop training materials and educate others on best practices

 

40% Contributions to the Team

• Act as subject matter expert for advanced analytics, specifically within the domain of NLP
• Develop roadmaps for advanced analytics projects and support decomposition into scrum artifacts such as epics, stories, and tasks; estimate size of tasks for project management
• Integrate with and support the team in executing developed roadmaps; volunteer for work in the backlog; coordinate efforts across the team to ensure completion and effectiveness
• Participate and contribute to scrum meetings i.e. daily stand-up, sprint planning, readouts and retrospectives
• Participate in team member interview process as needed

 

15% Cross functional Coordination and Communication

• Build strong relationships with cross-functional team members and business stakeholders
• Share business and technical learnings with the broader engineering and product organization, while adapting approach for different audiences
• Be an evangelist for data science within the company, and help non-technical partners understand how they can benefit from data science
• Work collaboratively across the Technology, UX, and Product organizations to ensure alignment towards business goals

 

Education, Experience and Skills Required:

• Advanced degree (PHD, MS) in relevant field. For example, but not limited to: physics, math, or computer science
• 5+ years of professional experience designing, building, training, deploying and evaluating NLP models in production software environments at scale
• Excellent verbal communication and business writing skills
• Experience collaborating with cross functional teams
• Healthcare experience preferred, but not required
• Agile/Scrum methodology experience preferred
• Familiarity with Linux/Unix/Shell environments
• Proficiency with at least one programming language (such as Perl, python, C/C++, java)
• Proficiency with data analysis languages and tools such as Python/Jupityr, R/RStudio
• Proficiency with relational databases and SQL including query analysis and optimization
• Experience with big data and analysis technologies preferred such as Hadoop, Spark, H2O
• AWS experience preferred

 

Behaviors and Abilities Required:

• You love to own & lead dynamic, important work, and have always excelled regardless of your prior field or role
• You find it difficult to turn down a good challenge; you ask a lot of questions & appreciate when others do so too
• You excel at building relationships and influencing at senior leadership levels
• Possess an eagerness to learn and disseminate new knowledge
• Have the ability to communicate technical information to non-technical audiences
• Ability to be flexible and change with the environment, industry and business demands
• Strong project management abilities, ideally using agile methodologies