BuildZoom (YC W13) is looking for a lead data engineer

BuildZoom is a marketplace for remodeling services that takes a data-centric approach to help solve a $600 billion market problem.

Imagine you're hiring a contractor to remodel your home: the legacy directory will send you to a list of contractors, paying for inclusion on their site. We start by considering everyone - 3.5 million licensed contractors in the US. We then drill down, using 15-years of historical permitting data (more than 50 million total) to find the best candidates for your exact requirements. We then streamline the hiring process to make things as simple as possible.

Using this approach, we are currently supporting over 600,000 monthly visitors and growing.

We're looking for a supremely talented engineer with expertise, dealing with large data sets, for a leadership role at our company.

Here are some of the problems we're working on right now:

1. Allowing users to visualize current remodeling activity in their neighborhood so they can find and hire a contractor with local expertise. Challenges include accurately geo mapping remodeling permit data to specific property coordinates and ensuring low page load times as users navigate around a map (using the Google Maps API).

2. Developing a heuristic to quantify the relative price range of a contractor that takes into account their historical pricing as well as economic data about the neighborhoods where they typically work. Current challenges include reconciling our remodeling data with US census data; developing a process to consistently account for monthly fluctuations in pricing data.

Requirements:

1. Expertise in structuring and managing large data sets 2. Ability to balance immediate productivity and long-term goals 3. Relevant academic/professional experience 4. Experience with probabilistic classifiers (e.g. Naive Bayes) and statistical analysis is a plus 5. Passion for using data to empower consumers and improving the status quo

Perks

1. Opportunity to be the lead data engineer at a start-up solving a big, real world problem 2. Competitive equity, salary & benefits 3. Great HQ located near Caltran and Bart 4. Talented, diverse co-workers that put the team first 5. Flexible, family-friendly culture

If you're interested in having a conversation with one of the founders to learn more, e-mail us at founders@buildzoom.com