Research at Allstate

Allstate is one of the largest car and home insurers in the US, serving more than 16 million households and earning over $35 billion in revenue annually. We’re also widely recognised as one of the best places to work in Northern Ireland.

At Allstate we’re on a mission to use data, math and machine learning to directly shape every aspect of how we operate. Of course, when working with hundreds of millions of data points, computer science and programming also play an essential role.

The D3: Data, Discovery & Decision Science group has over 300 exceptional data scientists, data engineers and business analysts based in Belfast, Bangalore, Charlotte, Chicago, Seattle and Silicon Valley. It’s a great place to be if you’re interested in solving business problems using the concepts developed in your degree.

Your role in the team

D3 is a central team supporting all areas of Allstate. As a result, we have a considerable variety of ongoing data analytics and engineering projects at any given time, each with its own unique set of complex requirements. Some examples include:

• Developing a distributed graph database within the Apache Hadoop framework for effective fraud detection.
• Designing a data pipeline that prepares unstructured data for analytic purposes such as natural language processing of customer submitted documents or deep neural networks for image classification of damaged vehicles.
• Exploring data generated by IoT devices such as information collected from mobile phone applications during driving.
• Integrating with real-time data streams to determine how much to bid in live auctions of details on individuals currently shopping for insurance.
• Constructing an automated and scalable RDBMS to hierarchical JSON transformation that feeds a master analytics data lake including appropriate software tests, data cleaning, validation, etc.

We require people who are passionate about developing outstanding solutions to complex problems, enthusiastic to learn whatever tools are best for the task at hand and aren’t afraid to challenge the status quo.

Data analytic engineers are responsible for:

• Writing code that meets requirements with due consideration to efficiency, scalability and stability.
• Developing solutions to complex data problems.
• Extracting, transforming and loading large amounts of data.

Successful candidates will gain hands-on exposure to a variety of technologies, work on real data problems related to data science and become a key part of a growing group dedicated to research, development, and knowledge sharing.

So, what are the essential criteria to apply?

• Must be a UK/RoI/EU citizen or possess a current UK visa and eligible to take up full time, permanent employment. EU candidates must also demonstrate they are eligible to take up UK employment post-Brexit.
• Enrolled in university studying computer science, mathematics, physics, or a related, highly quantitative field which requires a 3rd or 4th year placement as part of your degree, in which you are expected to attain a first-class degree.

We also have some desirable criteria

• Proven experience in general purpose programming such as Python, Scala, Java or C/C++
• Experience in any of the following:
• Distributed computing or big data frameworks such as Apache Spark, Mesos, Hadoop, Kafka, etc.
• Real-time data streaming within REST, Apache Flink, Storm, etc.
• Job scheduling, automation, and maintenance.
• Linux and shell scripting.
• Relational, graph or NoSQL database technology and query languages such as SQL or Gremlin.
• Data formats such as CSV, JSON, XML, Parquet or Avro.
• ETL software such as Ab Initio, Informatica or CloverETL.
• Machine learning or statistics to solve real-world problems.

What we offer

• A competitive salary
• Extensive and thorough in-house training
• A globally collaborative working environment
• Valuable real-life work experience working with the latest technologies