Data Scientist

About Players Health

At Players Health, we are on a mission to create the safest and most accessible environment for an athlete to play the sports that they love. This is not only our mission, but also our promise to sports. A promise we will not break. There are over 50 million youth athletes playing sports in the US and they are counting on us to ensure that the environment that they are coming into not only accepts them for who they are, but fills them with encouragement, love, inspiration, and so much more.

Players Health is a VC backed, mission-driven, sports technology platform providing digital risk management services, reporting tools and insurance products to sports organizations to comply with the changing athletic environment and responsibilities.

Our Core Values

We Cannot Achieve Our Mission Without Having a Strong Culture. We Believe That At The Core Of a Strong Culture Is a Shared Set Of Values. The Values That We Hold True And Look For Our Employees To Embrace Are As Follows

• Lead with Mission: Our mission always comes first. If we stay on mission as an organization then we believe we will be successful in our professional and personal lives.
• Go Beyond: We're not satisfied with just "good enough" - we go above and beyond to achieve awesome results that impress and inspire.
• Operate like Owners: We believe in operational excellence. We take ownership of our work and approach every task with a sense of pride, responsibility, and commitment to excellence. We don't just rent our roles - we own them and strive to make a lasting impact.
• Virtue First: From the big decisions to the small details; honesty, integrity, and transparency are the bedrock of our culture and the foundation for everything we do.
• Service: We live to serve others with humility, empathy, and kindness. We put our customers, colleagues and community first, and always strive to exceed their expectations with a smile.
  
  
  

About The Role

The ideal candidate would be someone who has experience working for a Sports organization and working on analytics related to athlete safety, injuries, production while also having experience in risk management. The ideal candidate will also have at least 5-year experience with a strong foundation in statistical analysis and knowledgeable in actuarial science principles. The candidate is responsible for building predictive ML models and assessing risk within complex datasets, particularly in insurance and sports risk domains. The candidate is skilled in advanced programming languages like SQL, Python and R to analyze large volumes of data and generate actionable insights.

The ideal candidate is knowledgeable in working in various cloud environments and has experience in using Databricks platform. The candidate is also knowledgeable in ingesting big data from various Web Portals and Rest-Api.

The ideal candidate is also knowledgeable in using large language model (LLM) to score non-structured data for example in contract and policy documents. The candidate is familiar in various LLM concepts such as (among other things) Vectors, Prompt Engineering, Grounding, Fine- tuning.

The ideal candidate will collaborate with various departments in Sales, Marketing, and Underwriting to understand and participate in building innovative insurance and sports products.

This role will report to the head of Data Analytics team and is available to work remotely or from our Minneapolis Office. Players Health is a distributed workforce that offers a flexible, remote and/or hybrid work environment.

Players Health offers a competitive compensation and a comprehensive benefits package, including Medical, Dental, Vision, STD, LTD, and 401K. Additional benefits include Flexible Time Off, Parental Leave and more. Role comes with a salary commensurate with experience. You will join an organization going through significant growth as well as digital transformation. Players Health instills a mindset of ownership and accountability with all managers and team members, providing a “playbook” for best practices – defining expectations to meet the vision and strategy for growth.

Responsibilities (are Inclusive Of But Not Limited To)

• Risk Modeling: Develop ML models to predict risks and financial outcomes related,but not limited to, sports risk, athletes contracts, and other insurance products.
• Data Analysis: Extract meaningful insights from large datasets using statistical techniques like regression analysis, time series forecasting among other techniques
• Data Formatting: Combines data from various structure such as Json, SQL, Delta, Flat Files - to prepare and clean for data analysis and leverage for data standardization and reuse
• Model Validation: Ensure the accuracy and reliability of ML models by conducting repeatable testing.
• Data Visualization: Create clear and informative data visualizations to communicate insights and output from the ML Model to stakeholders.
• Data Operations: Investigate and resolve production issues to maintain a stable production environment
• Explore & Research needed technical knowledge and Coordinate with 3rd Party to implement projects in the Data Analytics team
• Stay apprized of the sports market and customer needs specific to sports, tournaments, facilities, contracts, and organizations.
• Align with and embody our company core values (Mission, Operational Excellence, Results Drive, Service, Virtue First)
• Identify areas for continuous improvement of processes to increase operational excellence
• Demonstrate responsiveness and urgency to internal customers, within and across departments.
• Drive continuous improvement with the development of new standards, best practices, and process improvements
• Work with the cross-functional teams to integrate model and estimate time & budget.
  
  
  

Minimum Skills & Qualifications

• Deep understanding of statistical concepts like probability distributions, regression analysis.
• Experience in applying machine learning algorithms to complex data sets for predictive modeling.
• Understands financial principles in Insurance and Collegiate Sports Domain
• 7+ years of experience in data analysis languages like Python, R, and SQL for data manipulation and model building.
• Worked in cloud environment preferably Azure
• 5+ experience in Databricks platform
• 5+ experience in RDBMS like Snowflake, Postgres, or SQL Server platform
• Programmed using various IDE preferably VS Code and Jupyter Notebook
• Experience in using SQL IDE tools
• Experience in Visualization tools such as Power-BI, Pyramid-Analytics
• Experience in common Python data transformation libraries to ingest data from Rest-Api and Web Portals
• Good interpersonal, communication, and collaboration skills
• Ability to write clean, well-documented code that follows good coding practices.
• A hands-on, engaged approach to solving problems.
• Excellent communication skills and experience in collaborative environments.
• Experience working in an agile development environment.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills to communicate strategy and solutions.
• Demonstrated ability to communicate and explain technical solutions to non- technical individuals.
• Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience/education in Data Analytics, Computer Science/Statistics
  
  
  

Desired Characteristics

• Experience working for a sports organization and working on analytics related to athlete safety, injuries, production while also having experience in risk management.
• Experience in applying machine learning algorithms to complex data sets for predictive modeling using Databricks in Azure.
• Deep understanding of statistical concepts especially in Collegiate Sports Domain
• 7+ years of experience in Python data analysis languages in Databricks
• 7+ years in using SQL as part of data analysis.
• Extensive Experience in Data wrangling from Rest-Api and Web Portal data sources
• Knowledgeable in Pyramid-Analytics
  
  
  

Additional Requirements

• Ability to travel occasionally for team events, collaboration, engagement, conferences, or customer visits
• Must have a dedicated safe and secure remote work environment
• Must have the ability to work and be productive in a remote work environment
• Exceptionally self-motivated and ability to work autonomously
• Proactive communicator in all communication methods, including email (Outlook), verbal (in-person & phone), instant messaging (Slack & Teams)
• Willingness and ability to attend virtual meetings with camera on – we respect that there are times when employees may need to turn their camera off. We also have a great culture and want to engage with you! By regularly using cameras, we form connections and get to know each other, as well as promoting positive and respectful interactions amongst colleagues.
• Located in or willingness to work on Central or Eastern Time Zone
• Must be 18 or older
• Work location must be in the United States
  
  
  

Players Health is committed to building a diverse and inclusive work environment. We are proud to be an equal opportunity employer and welcome all applicants regardless of race, color, religion, creed, gender, sexual orientation, marital status, gender identity, national origin or ancestry, age, citizenship, disability, pregnancy, veteran status, or any other basis protected by applicable law.