Who we are

Catawiki hosts weekly auctions for collectors. Examples of items that we have auctioned off in the past include a lock of Napoleon’s hair, a mammoth skeleton, various large meteorites, and the most expensive Lego set ever produced. Our website is visited millions of times every month by our registered users worldwide.

Although we only started a few years ago, our mission to make unique items available to everyone is already becoming a reality. The Catawiki offices across Europe house a dynamic, fast-growing and open organisation. Catawiki has a real ‘hands-on’ mentality, with a casual and friendly atmosphere. We share a strong team-spirit, and all of our inspired employees are motivated to use their own personal talents and skills as part of a whole.

We are very proud to be the first Benelux company to have received an investment from the famous Accel Partners and Lead Edge Capital (first venture capital investors in Facebook, as well as Dropbox, Spotify, and BlaBlaCar).

What you will do

Catawiki is looking for a Data Scientist to join its Data Science team. You will be responsible for performing advanced modeling and forecasting on a wide range of problems. In addition, you will be one of our first data science hires, which puts you in a great position to help shape the team and its direction.

Catawiki is not a standard e-commerce company. Our data is fairly unique, because we have very high item churn. This results from the fact that we auction off rare and unique items run on a weekly basis, so we don’t have long timelines to accumulate data on items. Therefore, out-of-the-box techniques like CF recommender systems won’t work and you’ll have to get creative. In addition, there is a lot of value that can be created by enhancing our auctioneer productivity with machine learning techniques, for instance by ranking item supply on their expected closing price.

Examples of what you’ll be working on:

• Improving our churn predictions models and methods for predicting customer lifetime value
• Improve the auctioneer process by making predictions on item value (based on the seller quality, item category, market trends, etc.)
• Help build a bespoke interest graph-based recommendation engine to personalise the items our users see on-site and in e-mail communication
• Providing internal consulting to answer key product questions and drive UX decisions and A/B testing
• Producing models to determine which emails to send to which customer, at what time

Who you are

• Master’s degree/Ph.D. in a quantitative discipline such as Statistics, Machine Learning, Economics, or Applied Math
• 2-3 years of experience as a data scientist, or comparably quantitative profession
• Machine Learning: practical experience with algorithms used to predict user behavior (churn, dormancy, purchase conversion, etc.) including: linear and logistic regression, mixture models, clustering, recommender systems, decision trees and random forests, naive Bayes, and support vector machines.
• Software Engineering: proven ability to produce prototypes and ideally commit to production using a performant programming language (Scala, Java, Python, etc.). Experience with version control systems, ideally Git.
• You have a Github account where you showcase your code and projects

What we offer

An exciting job in a young, fast growing, dynamic & international organisation. We offer an excellent salary and suitable terms of employment, as well as a company Macbook. Naturally, compensation for relocating can be provided.