About Us The world isn’t standing still, and neither is Allstate. We’re moving quickly, looking across our businesses and brands and taking bold steps to better serve customers’ evolving needs. That’s why now is an exciting time to join our team. You’ll have opportunities to take risks, challenge the status quo and shape the future for the greater good. You’ll do all this in an environment of excellence and the highest ethical standards – a place where values such as integrity, inclusive diversity and accountability are paramount. We empower every employee to lead, drive change and give back where they work and live. Our people are our greatest strength, and we work as one team in service of our customers and communities. Allstate operate a very flexible hybrid working policy that will allow you to design your working week in collaboration with your manager with a blend of remote and office working for NI based employees as well as condensed working patterns (4 day week/9 day fortnight). Employees based in GB will be employed on a permanent remote working contract. Join our team and you’ll find challenge and reward in a culture of innovation, support and balance. Location Belfast/ Derry – Londonderry/ Strabane Your role in the team Allstate is hiring for their Big Data, Machine Learning, AI, research department; D3: Data, Discovery & Decision Science. Data Analytic Engineers and Data Scientists collaborate in D3, using computer vision, cognitive computing, neural networks, natural language processing, experimentation, and behavioural science on a daily basis to develop groundbreaking solutions in the insurance industry. Your role will involve exploring petabytes of data, wrangling and cleaning this data to perform analytics on it, researching new ways to solve business problems, and working as part of a team to build and deploy big data pipelines that utilise machine learning algorithms and complex statistics. Research at Allstate Allstate is one of the largest vehicle and home insurers in the US, serving more than 16 million households and earning over $35 billion in revenue annually. D3 at Allstate are on a mission to use data, mathematics, and machine learning to directly shape every aspect of how we operate. When working with hundreds of millions of data points, computer science and programming also play an essential role. You will join a global team containing hundreds of exceptional data engineers and scientists. Example projects At any given time, there will be many R&D projects in progress, each with unique and complex data requirements. Here are just a few examples: Analysing customer sentiment using natural language processing applied to transcribed phone call recordings to propose more effective call centre routing and handling techniques for incoming phone calls. Using neural networks to assess damaged vehicles based off photographs taken in the Allstate app to allow for faster claim handling. Processing topographical maps and weather trends to determine flood risk to homes in real time during the quoting process. Restructuring historical RDBMS data to a distributed graph database and visualising relationships between fraudulent claims to detect and prevent repeat offences and propose new business processes to catch and handle fraud. The Culture We are a research group; we work on long-term projects, read scientific papers and textbooks, talk about ideas, explore new programming languages, huddle around whiteboards try out the latest machine learning algorithms, and think about what the company should look like next year and in five years. We get things done; we develop the next generation of products, crank out code, do scrum and agile, GitHub and Jenkins, code reviews and sprint reviews. We invest heavily in cutting-edge software and hardware and encourage experimentation. We use and contribute to open-source software and work mainly on Unix. So, what are the essential criteria to apply? All candidates must evidence an existing right to work in the UK' Achieved a First class bachelor’s degree (or expected to achieve by summer 2022) in a highly quantitative field such as mathematics, physics or computer science with at least one year of experience in a related field OR Achieved a First class/Distinction or equivalent Master’s degree (or expected to achieve by summer 2022) in a highly quantitative field such as mathematics, physics or computer science OR A quantitative PhD OR 2:1 degree classification or higher and at least two years of experience in a related field Must be an EU citizen or possess a UK Tier 1 visa which entitles the holder to take up full time employment in the UK and must be eligible to travel to the US. We also have some desirable criteria Proven experience in any of the following: Distributed computing or big data frameworks such as Spark, Mesos, Hadoop, AWS, Scality, etc. Programming in Python, R, Scala, Java, C/C++, etc. Ability to learn new technical skills and methods Working with structured relational databases and writing queries (e.g. SQL), nested data structures, stream processed data, or unstructured data Machine learning or statistics to solve real-world problems Conducting data analytics and root cause analysis to answer business questions and identify opportunities for improvement Leading & managing teams of technical individuals What we offer As Digital DNA’s Workplace of the Year 2020 winners, we offer a generous benefits package that includes flexible annual leave entitlement, dental and healthcare insurance, an attractive pension package and discounts on gym memberships, public transport and parking. Allstate invests heavily in your development, as an employee you will have access to multiple world-class learning platforms and courses from our award-winning in-house Learning & Development team. We pride ourselves in providing clear career paths and opportunities for internal mobility allowing you to further develop within the organisation. We encourage a better work life balance and you’ll have the opportunity to apply for various flexible working arrangements. Statement on Fair Employment and Equal Opportunities Allstate NI wishes to ensure equal opportunity is given to all job applicants. This company will not discriminate on the grounds of race, gender (including gender reassignment status), sexual orientation, religious belief, political opinion, marital status, age or disability. We are an equal opportunities employer. We welcome applications from all suitably qualified persons. However, as women are currently under-represented in our workforce, we would particularly welcome applications from women. All appointments will be made on merit. Applicants should note Allstate NI complete AccessNI background checks on all candidates offered a position. The closing date for receipt of applications is Friday 12th November 2021