OUR TEAM 

Pet Insight is a team of data scientists and engineers, life scientist and veterinarians, and other technologists that have partnered with Whistle Labs - the premier pet care IoT technology, Banfield Pet Hospital - the largest general veterinary practice in the United States, and pet owners - citizen scientists, to conduct the largest population health study in pet care.  

The Pet Insight Project has been built fresh, from the ground up, with modern best-in-class technologies. In a short time, our small team (with the support of the larger Kinship and Whistle teams) has created a brand-new system, built around our unique machine learning algorithms that have been trained and validated on an unmatched volume of real-world data. While there’s plenty of work left to be done, we are building out and scaling up, and our system is already helping us to understand the life of a pet on a second-by-second basis, in a level of detail never explored before. We’re looking for an expert in creating and training data-driven models to lead the extension of our current technologies and develop new and innovative ways that ML can help improve the lives of pets. As part of our small team of like-minded data scientists, you’ll also help deploy these models to production to help process time-series sensor data, classify images, label sounds, or even help understand videos depending on the specific use case.

HOW YOU’LL HELP EVERYONE PET PARENT LIKE A PRO

The work you’ll do here is critically important because “pets can’t talk”, they can’t tell you when they’re not feeling well or need something.  The Pet Insight team “gives pets a voice” and empower pet parents to improve the quality of life for the pets they love so much.  

Pet Insight is using artificial intelligence to develop advanced deep learning models (see FilterNet https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/20/9/2498) to uncover important links between pet behaviors, activity, and health.  

This understanding is critical to telling a more complete “health story” and empowering pet owners to better care for the animals they love.  Pet Insight’s algorithms are integrated as key product features in Kinship’s services to enable a very personalized experience for the pet owner, creating earlier awareness around pet needs, stimulating better decision-making, and accelerating the growth of core pet care products.

It also has the power to transform conventional veterinary medicine, by moving the profession beyond generally accepted practice to a whole new level of personalized care driven by objective, evidence-based, precision-medicine.

Your job will be to leverage our one-of-a-kind dataset to help shape and build applications
that use machine learning models to help improve the lives of pets by:

• Conducting experiments to investigate the feasibility of new product features for improving pet health and happiness using machine learning, retrospective analyses, behavioral data, and medical records.
• Leading development and statistical design of new product features, from early exploration through commercial deployment. 
• Designing user surveys, collecting survey data, and analyzing survey responses to better understand and improve our statistical models.
• Developing, implementing, and deploying machine learning models that leverage our unique combination of behavior data and medical record data to detect and alert owners to potential health problems using changes in the pets’ behaviors.
• Managing and collaborating with data science contractors.
• Performing statistical analysis on the outputs of machine learning models to help update, re-train, and re-deploy new ML models to improve the overall data processing pipeline.
• Improve and extend machine learning models used to predict a dog’s behavior from sensor-based time-series data. (See more about Pet Insight’s state of the art deep
  learning architecture and behavior predictions.)
• Contributing to the creation, deployment, and scaling of machine learning and predictive algorithms in a production environment

THE PRO WE’RE LOOKING FOR

As Kinship people, we have three pillars that set out how we aim to be--in our everyday work, and in how we approach each other. We call these our Cultural Pillars. In all of the roles that we hire for, we look for people who are Optimistic, Purposefully Inquisitive, and Open to All. 

We are looking for a Machine Learning (ML) Engineer to help us create artificial intelligence products. Machine Learning Engineer responsibilities include:

• Design and developing machine learning and deep learning systems
• Run machine learning tests and experiments
• Study and transform data science prototypes
• Research and implement appropriate ML algorithms and tools
• Develop machine learning applications according to requirements
• Select appropriate datasets and data representation methods
• Perform statistical analysis and fine-tuning using test results
• Train and retrain systems when necessary
• Extend existing ML libraries and frameworks

TECHNICAL SKILLS:

And for this role, we hope you have the following skills we require to round out our team:

Here's what we're looking for in a strong candidate:

• Technical degree (BS/MS/PhD in Engineering, Computer Science, Math, Physics).
• 5+ years experience in machine learning and software development.
• Experience developing new machine learning models and deploying them to production.
• Experience with the Python analytics tools suites (Pandas, numpy, Jupyter notebooks, etc.)
• Familiarity with machine learning frameworks (like Keras, TensorFlow,  or PyTorch) and libraries (like scikit-learn)
• Experience with machine learning, statistical model building, and hypothesis testing. 
• Experience writing and maintaining production level code.
• Strong documentation skills.

If you also had these experiences, you’d knock it out of the dog park:

• Experience working with electronic medical records (EMRs).
• Survey development and analysis experience.
• Experience with machine learning on time series data. 

LEADERSHIP COMPETENCIES:

• You Have Courage: a willingness to bring forth a new idea, engaging others across Kinship to support you, and taking risks and action will full accountability
• You Learn at Pace: a consistent and fast work ethic to meet growth goals, and the ability to evolve and pivot quickly from what you’ve learned
• You Value Difference: a genuine belief in inclusion and diversity is in your DNA, and it shows up in your work, and how you work.