Blok is a digital real estate agency for residential properties. Simply put, we help people buy and sell apartments. Why? Real estate transactions are notorious for being the largest and most stressful financial decisions we take during our lives. There are a lot of questions, uncertainty and the process has traditionally been opaque and costly. Our goal at Blok is to fix that by providing a transparent and cost-efficient service, where the customer feels that she’s in control.

The Role

Blok is building a modern real estate platform that gives superpowers to our inhouse agents and customers on the field. We are now looking for a Data Scientist to join our product team of builders. Your role is to improve and extend our platform to new areas and provide analysis to support our operative decision making.

You'd be working with real estate sales data, time-to-event data of real estate listings, usage data from our own platform as well as various open and spatial data. You'd also be looking for opportunities to acquire more data and improve existing data infrastructure. You'd be building valuation models, time-to-event models and analysing topics such as marketing effectiveness, customer acquisition and funnel performance. We offer a diverse job description of mathematical modeling, machine learning, ad-hoc statistical analysis, data engineering and backend service development, with the focus depending on your skills and interests as well as varying business needs.

You’ll get ownership and responsibility to develop and maintain models and services on our platform. This requires a proactive and self-directed mentality. However you must also be able to work within a larger group since you’ll be collaborating with other team members on larger projects. We're looking for talented individuals with practical experience of data science projects, understanding of relevant mathematical principles and software engineering skills to develop and maintain production-level services. 

The Mission

You’ll enter the company in a very exciting phase of the company’s lifecycle as we are expanding to new markets and broadening our product portfolio. Your focus will largely lay on developing new products and services. The themes of these include: helping people find homes in highly competitive markets, help home-owners to monitor the value of their home and inhouse services to boost customer acquisition.

The Stack

For data science, we use mainly Python, R, SQL-databases and cloud storage buckets. We expect you to be fluent in either Python (including NumPy, Pandas etc.) or R as well as able and willing to work with both. We expect you to be able to implement microservices for production deployment of data science projects. Experience with front-end development is not required, but is considered a plus.

The Team

Although our company consists of enterprising professionals from many fields the company is at the core a technology company, which means engineering is highly appreciated and respected throughout the company. The overarching ethos of our engineering team centers around being proactive and hands-on. Our Blok product team is still rather small, only 6 people.

The Locale

Our office is located in Helsinki. We allow remote work, but expect to see you at the office on regular basis. We don't have strict language requirements, but Finnish and Swedish skills are a big plus.

The Process

Our recruitment process consists of five stages. We expect the application process to take between 2-3 weeks from start to finish.

1. Application: We review your CV and free form application.

2. First Interview: Applicants who fill the requirements are invited for an interview. The theme of the first interview is to get to know the applicant in-person and get a clearer understanding of their background and experience.

3. Task: Applicants who pass the first interview will receive a take-home programming task to evaluate their skills and approach to a set of problems.

4. Second interview: After reviewing the result of the task we invite select applicants to the second interview. The scope of the second interview is broader and its aim is to determine how the applicant would fit into the company culture and team. This interview typically includes other people from the engineering team and other departments outside engineering.

5. Offer: Applicants who pass all four stages receive a job offer.

The Offer

• A full-time position

• A competitive pay and possibility to take part in the company’s option program

• Flexible work hours and vacation: Morning person or a night owl, this job is for you

• Located near public transit: Easy access and treehugger friendly workplace

• Choose your own device policy: Whether you like to work with penguins, cute robots or expensive fruits we got you covered

• Break a leg! Seriously, we got you covered in our company healthcare plan

• Pension plan: We take care of you, even when you are old and wrinkly

• Maternity / paternity leave: Kids are the future, go spend time with them