Facebook Seeks Data Talent Through Crowdsourcing Competition

Every company has its own challenges in hiring data talent. Facebook, known for its hackathons and coding competitions, has launched a data talent competition on crowdsourcing site Kaggle.

Basically, it plans to let 10 teams compete in mapping the entire Internet, according to VentureBeat. The challenge: to find the most optimal path from node A to node B. It’s not that easy, though.

Says Facebook:

Unlike the map of a city, where best routes are relatively fixed except for the occasional construction or parade detour, the paths that information travels over the web are constantly changing. There is no centralized system of stoplights or traffic cops.  Instead, there are tens of thousands of autonomous systems using a common protocol to advertise the next available hops, updated depending on service agreements, capacity and load. This will be a test of both the candidates engineering know-how and their ability to statistically learn on complex, dynamic graph structures.

Facebook hired one participant in its summer challenge for data scientists, VB says. It’s not clear how many it will hire from this round, though it says it’s looking to fill positions at its Menlo Park, Calif., Seattle, New York, and London offices.

It says it’s looking for “’Big Data’ know-how, tenacity, and open-mindedness to help it build next-gen systems that transform the online experience for its more than 1 billion users.” The competition ends Nov. 21.