What is the hottest job in the country?

NEW YORK (FOX5NY) - For the second year in a row, data scientist is the hottest job in the country, according to Glassdoor.  But what do they actually do?

I spent a day at Dataiku, a new firm in downtown Manhattan, to see what this top tech job is all about.

While we visited, data scientist Jed Dougherty was working on setting up better predictive maintenance for 787 airplane engines.

A few weeks ago he was working to better predict eviction rates in Kansas City.

Those are just some of the problems he might solve in a typical day at Dataiku.

The French firm just moved its global headquarters here this summer after raising $14 million in Series A funding last fall, part of the tech explosion in New York City.

Dataiku CEO Florian Douetteau says their business is growing exponentially, meaning they’re doubling in size every year.
Today they have nearly 100 employees. Within the next 12 to 18 months they expect to have 200.

Florian co-founded Dataiku in 2013, developing software that, in his words, brings the geeks and the non-geeks together.
Florian says Dataiku is building a collaborative platform for data science, to solve the communications problems between data analysts and data scientists.

Dataiku’s clients are big names like L’Oreal, Cap Gemini, and NPR.

They have huge stakes in data today and need to innovate on a daily basis.

And their data problems vary.  Florian says they work on simple problems from retailers, like: how should they order products on their home page?

They also work on large problems for big brands like: should they spend more money advertising online or on television?

In the end, most data science problems involve two things: people and math.

Jed says you’re always working on problems that affect a lot of people. Often, your data records are individual people, and you’re trying to predict the actions of human beings.  That’s what drew him to the field.