Job description

It’s 7am and the alarm goes off. Some with a yawn, some with attempts at the alarm clock to
shut it off, some hiding in their blankets, some jumping right off the bed with a smile on their
face, kids everywhere start yet another day of discovery. We all know the feeling of the minutes
before the classroom: some will remember their kindergarten days, some will barely remember
with difficulty their last semester at university. But most of us will have a clear memory of those
professors who made a mark in our lives; and probably more than one chose a life path thanks
to them. A good professor is like a lighthouse, a solid reference in a confused landscape, a
mentor, someone who will talk to you from their experience, who will listen and who will give you
pointers on how to keep on going. A good professor is essential because they can truly get us
inspired by some specific subject.

You may have triggered by now memories of one or two key education professionals who, back
in the time, felt really special to you. Probably you can trace back that unique quality to things
such as an ability to listen, a passion to help pupils learn and a firm grip on the matter at hand.
Experience in the subject being discussed is of great value since it provides students with
reference points, allowing for exploration of the spaces between with a security net woven into
the exploration itself. Experience is the mother of wisdom, they say, and a good professor of
mathematics is someone who loves mathematics and has been working with them for some
time, or a good professor of cooking has tasty cooking experience.

Just a couple more remarks on great educating powers, and we’ll move on. Promised. First, to
teach is to learn. Great teachers have a passion to discover new things, to understand the world
they live in, to have a critical mindset that lets them uncover new areas or modes of relating to
their environment. Finally, to teach is to communicate. There’s people who will give you a
thrilling ride on the most mundane and boring of topics, grabbing your attention and helping you
unlock the secrets of learning, opening up the window of opportunity for your mind to also
acquire the passion to know more about what is being discussed.

If we don’t disagree too fiercely on what constitutes a great educator, read on! For we are
looking for the Richard Feynman of data science, we are looking for data science practitioners
who have it in them to let others jump on board their vessel of  experience and knowledge. We
are looking for someone who will participate in the awesome data analysis work we are doing at
BBVA Data & Analytics, to keep alive the practitioner side, and who will devote most of her/his
time to help others acquire the unique skills of a data scientist, through constant teaching and
learning in an established academic program at BBVA.

So what do we refer to as a data scientist? We have already published our view on that, and
you can get more info here: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs2/view/85308600. And now we need
you with your unique skills for education, pedagogy and sharing knowledge mixed with your
ability to add and subtract with Spark over a Cloudera cluster.

Desired Skills and Experience

What we are looking for is a Ph.D. in sciences or engineering, with experience in advanced data
analysis and statistics, who has occupied a position in academia teaching the wonders of data
science. Sounds like you?

Great! You will be helping others brush up their skills, or acquire them completely, in various
fields related to data analysis. You will be teaching the following topics, so you should be
familiar with them from a practical experience standpoint or a mixture of experience in using,
researching or teaching about them: SQL vs. NoSQL, MapReduce & the Hadoop ecosystem,
Spark, security issues around cloud computing. You know R, Python and Scala, and have been
using these languages over the previous base layers to do machine learning (perhaps with the
help of libraries such as MLib or other libraries in R or Python). You know your way around and
can easily explain supervised and unsupervised classification schemes as well as
recommendation engines. So K-means, Random Forest, SVMs and the like are your friends, as
well as time series, graphs, data frames and any other data structure that helps you find
answers to real world problems.

You know something about NLP and other semantic analysis potions. And you’ll be
accompanying your students into the wonderful world of data visualization and graphing, where
you know or have used tools/frameworks such as Tableau, Gephi, D3, and have also mapped
data using R/Python mapping libraries and CartoDB.

About this company

BBVA Data & Analytics
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Where would you work? BBVA Data & Analytics is the analytic Center of Excellence of Banco
Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria. We operate as a fully owned subsidiary and our goal is to globally
drive BBVA transformation into a digital data-driven business. We do this providing BBVA and
the world assets and expertise on financial transactional data analytics, data product design and
solution development. At BBVA Data & Analytics we combine our skills and experience with the
data resulting from BBVA's global activity. The richness of this data enables unprecedented
analysis of human behavior and interactions from economic, financial and social perspectives.

So now you know: got a passion to teach and learn? are you a great communicator?
experienced in the arts and crafts of data science? Make sure you reach out to us! Or at least
you let us know that we can reach out to you! ;)

Thanks for your time!