When it comes to mobile platforms, Wayfair has multiple end user focused apps across iOS and Android, with over 100 engineers working on them. As the recently appointed lead of the App Team here at Wayfair, I chose to ask fairly generic yet consistent questions upon my arrival to get…
How does a chemist with a postdoc in drug design end up working as a data scientist at an e-commerce home furnishings company? “Ha, so it’s a long story actually,” says Jen Wang, data science manager on the Marketing team at Wayfair. Jen always had an interest in healthcare, and……
John stands out in a room. With a flaming red beard and an arm of tattoos, he looks like he might be more at home in a Nordic tavern than an office. But once you notice his Captain Hammer t-shirt, the Gandalf action figure on his desk, and start talking……
This week in Wayfair Data Science’s Explainer Series, Data Science Tech Lead Peter B. Golbus discusses machine learning from a theoretical computer science perspective. In this video, we describe multiclass classification as an encoding task, i.e. a process for building compression schemes that convert large “files” (feature vectors) into small……
The App Platforms Team at Wayfair, empowering a team of more than 60 mobile developers with efficient tooling and processes, has been actively looking at the performance of it’s mobile offerings, turning this into more focused work in the past few months. We wanted to involve as many of the…
Introduction: Interior design and home decoration involve a high amount of guesswork. In addition to the visual appearance of each individual item, the arrangement of these items in a room and how well they fit together are also highly important. These considerations combine to create the notoriously subjective concept of……
Becoming a software engineer isn’t always straightforward or the same for each person; careers in the industry can start at any point in your working life, backed by a variety of studied disciplines or work experience. We know that good software engineers don’t always take the traditional path into development,…
This week in Wayfair Data Science’s explainer series, we’re discussing object pose estimation, an important problem in robotics and augmented reality (AR) applications. In robotics, when given a 3D model of an object a mobile robot must be able to localize it in space in order to manipulate it. This……
Our Engineering department at Wayfair spans two countries and more than 2,300 people. Discovering the interesting paths some of them have taken into tech can seem daunting given the numbers, so our Talent team chose to start local and host an exciting event for Boston students. “How She Got There”,…
Introduction If you are a Wayfair customer looking for some wall art to decorate your house, chances are you will land on our wall art SuperBrowse page (see image below or link here). This page shows a grid of 48 products, all of which are pieces of wall art. Those……
Wayfair has a strong emphasis on causal inference when evaluating the impact of business strategies. The assumptions of experimentation and regression are critical to know your models are capturing true effects and not confounding variables. In this video, Wayfair data scientist Dan VanLunen outlines some of these key assumptions along……
