Life as a Data Scientist in Facebook London, Adam C

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Sep 16 2016

Life as a Data Scientist in Facebook London, Adam C

By Meta Careers

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What do you do at Facebook?

I'm a Data Scientist on the analytics team in London. Like most data scientists, I am embedded with a cross-functional product team, which means I work most closely with product managers, engineers, and designers. My product team, Emerging Markets, helps businesses succeed in the developing world. No two days are the same, but my overarching aim is to use Facebook's wealth of data to help my team and the company make better decisions. This involves everything from setting goals and tracking metrics to running experiments and identifying new opportunities where we should focus.

What was your path to joining Facebook?

Before Facebook I worked for a small analytics startup in California, and before that I studied microbiology and worked in the public sector. There's no single path into data science at Facebook: while many of us were data scientists before joining, some of us worked previously in finance or consulting, while others came from academia (including a wide array of disciplines, from oceanography to law). What we all have in common is a bias towards analytical rigor and the ability to influence other people on a product team.

Which Facebook value (Move Fast, Focus on Impact, Build Social Value, Be Open, Be Bold) resonates most with your team?

Focus on Impact. At any point in time, there might be thousands of new ideas we could focus on building, but those ideas could vary in potential impact by several orders of magnitude. Quantifying opportunities allows us to prioritise ruthlessly.

What's your favourite part of being a data scientist?

We're constantly discovering ways in which people use our products that we never imagined. It's always exciting to find these novel use cases, since it puts us in a position of doubling down on new products or features that are already showing traction. On the other hand, it's also humbling to be reminded that the >2 billion people using Facebook every day collectively represent a more powerful engine for generating product ideas than any given team working at Facebook—and the only way we can listen to such a large community is by studying the data.

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