About Foursquare
Foursquare is the leading independent location technology company, powered by our deep understanding of how people move throughout the world.
Our solutions help businesses make smarter decisions, developers create more engaging experiences, and brands build more effective marketing strategies.
Foursquare’s platform includes Attribution, Audience, Pinpoint, Proximity, Places, Pilgrim SDK and Visits.
As the industry’s first and only accredited company for location data from the Media Rating Council (MRC), this foundation powers all our solutions — those that exist today and those we have yet to build.
Over 14 billion consumer-verified place visit confirmations help us keep our map and models fresh and up-to-date, building a phone’s-eye-view of the world with 105 million unique places of interest worldwide.
About the Team
The Places Team is responsible for building and curating Foursquare’s Places Database.
We combine billions of individual pieces of information into a comprehensive dataset of hundreds of millions of places around the world.
The database spans every type of point-of-interest across the world with over a thousand different types of places such as restaurants, stores, parks, hotels, and colleges.
In addition to powering our branded products, Places powers customer applications ranging from maps, navigation, analytics and everything in between for tens of thousands developers, including Apple, Microsoft, Uber and many more.
Users, including software engineers, data scientists, analysts, and product managers, mix real time precision edits with a git-like branch and merge model for large scale changes.
About the role:
In this role, you will be instrumental in improving the quality of our Places data by researching and acquiring new data sources as well as contributing to our data processing software.
You will investigate and solve complex data quality and delivery problems.
You will author specifications for new tools and help manage technical projects.
Ideal candidates are independent, hard working individuals who pay strong attention to detail, show great communication and organizational skills, and like to get to the bottom of complicated problems.
Responsibilities of the role:
- Acquire, curate, and maintain point-of-interest data from diverse sources
- Collaborate with the Product team to establish long-term, achievable roadmap goals
- Build, improve, and utilize data and analysis pipelines to improve the quality, comprehensiveness, and efficiency of Foursquare’s data enrichment and delivery systems
- Scale out your contributions using big-data frameworks like Spark, EMR, and Hive
- Create and use databases to improve the team’s reporting and analytics
Qualifications:
- Proficient with Unix commands and comfortable working on the command line
- Adept using a scripting language like Python or Ruby to process text files and get things done
- Experience exploring and manipulating structured and unstructured datasets
- Strong attention to detail and capacity for thorough, self-directed data analysis and troubleshooting.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
The data issues we deal with are subtle and complex, and being able to distill these problems for stakeholders is one of our most valuable contributions.
Nice to have:
We don’t necessarily expect candidates to have prior experience with our specific set of technologies.
We care most about finding people with the right mindset toward data quality in general and excitement about location data problems.
That said, strong candidates will probably have prior experience with at least one of the following:
- Data Querying and manipulation in Spark, Hadoop, and Hive
- Regular expressions
- Web scraping
- Technical project management skills
- Experience with relational and non relational databases
Foursquare is proud to foster an inclusive environment that is free from discrimination.
We strongly believe in order to build the best products, we need a diversity of perspectives and backgrounds.
This leads to a more delightful experience for our users and team members.
We value listening to every voice and we encourage everyone to come be a part of building a company and products we love.
Foursquare is an Equal Opportunity Employer.
All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, protected Veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.