I'm looking for data engineers

I'm interrupting the regular programming for a quick announcement: we're looking for data engineers at Better. You would be the first one to join and would work a lot directly with me.

Some fun things you could work on (these are all projects I'm working on right now):

• Building a forecasting model using MCMC to predict volume the next few months. Productionize it in the form of a job that posts an updated visualization to Slack every night.
• Migrate our data warehouse to Redshift.
• Write and productionize a web scraper to ingest a bunch of financial third party data.
• Work with business people to figure out what to measure and define KPIs for the company.
• Fit Gamma distributions to conversion data to understand the time lag and conversion rates.
• Work on mixed-integer optimization problems to find the best loans for borrowers.
• Work with the product team to understand our conversion funnel and friction points to the user.
• Build an ETL pipeline that downloads phone call mp3s, transcribes them to text, and ingests them into the database.

This position is very engineering-heavy at its core, and the main qualification is solid programming skills. I like to see at least a couple of years of professional software experience, and a programming skills that go back at least five years.

Other than that, we don't require any particular skills, and certainly no fancy academic credentials. However, a curiosity about what makes a startup succeed is great, and if you know some basic statistics that doesn't hurt (but certainly isn't required).

What does Better do? I've written a blog post about why I went into the mortgage industry if you're interested. In short, it's an enormous industry and also a very terrible one. We think we can fix it, by making mortgages fast, easy, and inexpensive. And we're not fixing it in a sketchy way (for instance by lending to people who can't afford the loan). We focus on the seven million Americans who get a normal plain mortgage every year, and we are making the experience better by solving all the pain points using technology.

Sounds interesting? Definitely let me know at erik at better.com!

(The binary globe picture is somewhat ironic. I have fascination for “data” stock photos.)