JOE Listings (Job Openings for Economists)
February 1, 2019 - July 31, 2019
Zillow Group
Position Title/Short Description
Section: Full-Time Nonacademic
Location: Seattle, Washington, UNITED STATES
JEL Classification: 00 -- Default: Any Field
Keywords:
Real Estate
Forecasting
Causal Inference
Full Text of JOE Listing:
About the team
Join our industry-leading Economic Research team bringing innovative analysis, creativity and excellence to the U.S. housing market. We create, productionalize, analyze, and share a full suite of housing data products and analysis for an audience inside and outside of Zillow. Our work contextualizes Zillow’s unparalleled living database of all homes and hundreds of millions of customers to provide insight to everyday consumers and open data to hundreds of researchers and policymakers across the country. You’ll work in an informal, fun, collaborative atmosphere with a dynamic team with a diverse range of interests and skills.
Learn more about what we are doing at https://www.zillow.com/research
About the role
Zillow Group’s Economic Research team is looking for a bright and curious Economists who have a passion for applying creative economic thinking to business problems and solve them systematically with mathematical models. The problems this role may work on include:
- Apply economic analysis to a host of problems ranging from impact analysis, performance attribution, segmentation, and pricing
- Build interpretable models to measure the impact of real estate market developments on Zillow’s business and financial performance
- Help improve and expand the forecasts of our suite of world-class housing market metrics, from 1 week to several years out
- Provide insights into the drivers of our forecast by highlighting assumptions and outlining what factors drive our view
- Model the intricate relationship between prices, volumes, and other real estate market variables both within and between geographic levels
- Build novel analytical frameworks and models from the ground up
- Communicate results and insights to business, finance, and partner analytics teams
- Work closely with our applied scientists and engineers to productionalize models and dashboards
Who you are
You will not shy away from ambiguity or complexity. You will develop a deep understanding of our mission, data sources, metrics. You enjoy sitting with the business, learn about the problems they face, and translate them to models. You are eager to use the intuition you've developed in the past, through excellence in your education and hands-on experience, to help us derive economic insights from our massive data sets. You are passionate about helping our business succeed by making data driven recommendations based on your analysis. You are an owner/operator of your models that takes pride in benchmarking the results of your forecast on a regular basis and creates deep tooling that allows you to explain changes on-demand to a non-technical audience. You will ideally have:
- An advanced degree (PhD preferred) in Economics, Finance, Statistics, or similar
- 3+ years of work experience in a fast paced environment (significantly more experience also considered)
- Passion for better understanding the relationship between real estate markets and Zillow Group’s business units
- Deep expertise in one or more of the following areas: Now- and Forecasting models, Causal Inference, Factor Analysis; experience with ML models a plus
- Solid knowledge of either Python or R, including how to scale models to many units (100,000+); familiarity with SQL
- Drive to succeed in a self-starting environment where you can innovate with a high degree of freedom and make a large business impact
- Strong written, verbal, and visual communication skills
- Experiencing working cross-functionally between business, tech, and science teams
Get to know us
Zillow Group is owned, fueled and grown by innovators who help people make better, smarter decisions around all things home. We encourage one another at every level, and our efforts are supported by employee-driven, world-class benefits that enable us to enjoy our lives outside the office while building fulfilling careers that impact millions of individuals every day.
Zillow Group is an equal opportunity employer committed to fostering an inclusive, innovative environment with the best employees. Therefore, we provide employment opportunities without regard to age, race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion, disability, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, or any other protected status in accordance with applicable law. If there are preparations we can make to help ensure you have a comfortable and positive interview experience, please let us know.