Career
596 curated resources for your PhD to Tech journey.
Essential Reading
New to tech careers for economists? Begin with these foundational resources.
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Econ PhD who conducted 250+ interviews at Amazon shares job search strategy. Failed 2014 search (30 apps, 0 offers) → successful 2015 (100 apps, 35 interviews, Amazon offer). Covers networking, resume, behavioral interviews, technical prep.
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Honest narrative of 7 months job searching with constant rejections. Why she left academia, Python learning strategy, 8-week bootcamp experience. Has YouTube channel with day-in-the-life content.
- 3
Columbia PhD to LinkedIn Staff DS. Internship strategy (Quora for startup pace, Facebook for research), timeline, 'the big talk' with advisors, reverse interviewing teams. Founded Economists in Tech LinkedIn group.
- 4
Stanford PhD to Google/Shopify. Interview experiences at Google, Amazon, Facebook, Uber. 4-part comprehensive guide.
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5 key areas: ads design, ROI estimation, marketplace incentives, causal inference, equilibrium effects.
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Framework for economist roles: advising strategy, building products, evaluating impact, thought leadership. Five comparative advantages over data scientists.
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Harvard PhD to tenure-track at Chicago Booth to VP at Uber. How Pat Bajari recruited structural IO economists to Amazon, economist work at marketplace companies, managing career risk.
- 8
First female John Bates Clark Medal winner, pioneered tech economics with Hal Varian (Google). How CEO Steve Ballmer recruited her, taking two leaves from Harvard, the origin story of tech economists.
- 9
JEP article 'Economists (and Economics) in Tech Companies' - foundational reading on why tech hires economists. Amazon employs 150+ PhD economists. Focuses on causal inference, market design, incentives. Full PDF: https://gsb-faculty.stanford.edu/susan-athey/files/2022/04/economists_in_tech.pdf
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LinkedIn guide on navigating tech's job market. Networking tips, role types, expectations. Key advice: don't be first economist.
Understanding Roles
Learn how DS/Economist roles differ across companies and levels.
Dedicated Economist job family with RFCA (reduced-form), STRUC (structural), FMF (forecasting) …
Clearest breakdown: DS→documents, Applied Scientist→ML systems, Research Scientist→papers, …
Product DS does predictive/prescriptive analysis with experiments; Analyst does descriptive …
L3→L4 reliable, L4→L5 strategic (defining vs solving problems), L5→L6 multiplier (scaling through …
'Data Scientist', 'Economist', 'Applied Scientist' can involve similar work. Title matters less than …
What Teams Do
One exemplar article per domain to understand different team types.
Maps the entire marketplace DS landscape: Marketplace team designs dispatch/pricing, Fleet team builds optimal pricing models. Shows how pricing pairs economics literature with econometrics.
Learning rate (64%) exceeds win rate (12%) at mature products. Platform serves ~300 teams. Shows how experimentation platforms measure their own ROI.
End-to-end tour of ad systems: eligibility filtering, candidate generation, ML models, auction, feedback loop. Explains budget-split A/B testing for two-sided marketplaces.
Moderates content for 71M daily users. 10% of FTEs + $100M+/year on safety. 53% reduction in abuse reports after real-time voice safety.
Maps Shopper Staffing across Marketplace Forecasting, Supply Planning, Real-time Capacity. Shows how forecasts feed downstream decision systems.
Interactive visual tour of 10 algorithmic applications. Covers exploration vs exploitation, cold-start problems, human-in-the-loop stylist collaboration.
Markov model segments users into activity states, monitors transition probabilities. CURR identified as highest-leverage metric—drove 4x DAU growth over 3 years.
Leading Lights
20 pioneers who forged the path for tech economics.


















Companies Hiring
Career portals for tech companies hiring economists and data scientists.
Job Boards
Specialized job boards for economists and data scientists.
HEOR job postings for pharma and consulting. European and global positions.
Substack newsletter by Zoë Plakias curating job opportunities for applied economists. Regular postings across academia, tech, government, and consulting.
Tech companies post here: Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Uber, Airbnb, Wayfair, Stripe. Most DS roles on LinkedIn instead.
ASA comprehensive list of pharma biostatistics internships with deadlines. Updated annually.
Networking
Conferences, communities, and fellowships to build connections.
Largest causal inference conference for tech economists (~800 participants). Free registration for job market PhDs. Amazon, Google, Netflix, Stripe recruit here. Resume deadline typically Sept-Oct. Essential networking event.
The only dedicated online community for economics PhDs in tech. Functions as informal job board where members share openings, provide referrals, and discuss interview processes. Free to join.
Active community of 8,400+ members for peer support and ongoing discussion. Useful for job market questions, interview prep, and connecting with others making the academia-to-tech transition.
Economics and Computation conference at Stanford (July 2025). Focus on mechanism design, auctions, market design. Student registration just $5 through SIGecom membership.
Premier academic conference for large-scale digital experimentation (Nov 14-15, Cambridge MA). Sponsored by Microsoft, Meta, Google with speakers from Netflix, Airbnb, Stripe, Lyft. Intimate size enables substantive networking.
Application Materials
Resumes, portfolios, GitHub profiles, and personal websites.
Gold-standard 24-page PDF with 9 resume examples from PhDs who landed BCG, Goldman, FAANG. CV-to-resume conversion with discipline-specific framing.
Former Microsoft/Amazon/Uber recruiter reveals 6-10 second resume scan process. Debunks ATS myths, shows before/after examples, networking strategies to bypass ATS.
Only dedicated course on GitHub optimization for DS job seekers. Profile README, project resume construction, hiring manager perspective. Adopted by multiple university career centers.
PhD astrophysicist to Principal Engineer. Ranks 3 portfolio project types by value, GitHub documentation best practices, learning industry lingo without deep expertise.
6 years portfolio experience. Compares 5 platforms (personal site, GitHub, Kaggle, Medium, LinkedIn). Content strategy for technical tutorials, analysis reports, career journey docs.
CUPED++ with post-stratification, Bayesian/frequentist approaches, sequential testing, clustered experiments, switchback experiments. Written by ex-Airbnb data scientists. Replaces Kohavi's A/B testing book.
Open-source uplift modeling and CATE estimation with meta-learners (S, T, X-learner).
Three-sided marketplace needs region-time randomization. Achieved 30% faster experimentation.
CUPED used at Netflix, Booking, Meta, Uber, Airbnb, LinkedIn, DoorDash, Faire.
A/B test of A/B tests comparing individual-level vs cluster-based randomization.
100+ curated questions: bias-variance, regularization, neural networks, backprop, CNNs, RNNs. 11.6k GitHub stars. Includes ML system design cases: YouTube recs, LinkedIn feed, ad CTR. Author received NVIDIA, Microsoft, Amazon offers.
6 structured chapters: algorithms, ML coding, fundamentals, system design, behavioral. Updated 2025 with Agentic AI chapter. Author received offers from Meta, Google, Amazon, Apple. MIT licensed.
200+ questions across math, CS, ML workflows, algorithms. Difficulty tagged. 30 systems design questions. Companion answers at github.com/zafstojano/ml-interview-questions-and-answers. The book is FREE online.
47 free lessons covering complete ML lifecycle: product design, data prep, feature engineering, training, serving, monitoring, CI/CD, testing. 30k GitHub stars. Includes working code from laptop to distributed cluster.
Amazon Principal Applied Scientist. Deep articles on feature stores, real-time retrieval, ML testing. His applied-ml repo has 600+ curated papers from Netflix, Spotify, Pinterest. Co-authored 'A Year of Building with LLMs' (O'Reilly).
Same author as Chip Huyen's book, same content. Free lecture notes: ML production, training data, feature engineering, deployment, monitoring. Guest tutorials from Made With ML, Stitch Fix. 24 final project demos on YouTube.
6-step framework with timing recommendations. Free worked examples: Video Recommendations, Harmful Content Detection, Bot Detection. Written by former Meta and Amazon hiring managers.
6 complete ML system design cases: YouTube recommendations, LinkedIn feed ranking, ad click prediction, delivery time estimation, Airbnb search ranking. Links to source company engineering blogs.
Structured 9-step formula: problem clarification, data requirements, ML objective, offline/online metrics, feature engineering, candidate generation → ranking → filters, training data, architecture, serving/deployment.
Essential ML system design book by Chip Huyen. Based on Stanford CS 329S.
7-step framework with 10 detailed solutions: visual search, video recommendation, ad prediction.
200+ curated links: probability/stats (40+ questions), SQL, ML algorithms, real case studies, FAANG-specific prep, deep learning (40+ questions), NLP (30+ questions), Spark (55+ questions), GenAI topics.
Downloadable cheatsheets (SQL, stats, ML/DL), question bank with '150 Essential DS Questions' PDF, case studies, portfolio examples. Closest structural equivalent to the book. 4.4k GitHub stars.
100+ free practice questions: SQL, Python, statistics, ML, probability. Same author as 'Ace the Data Science Interview'. 60+ SQL from FAANG with solutions. Interactive PostgreSQL environment. Free 9-day crash course.
Interactive quizzes on ROW_NUMBER, RANK, LAG/LEAD. Consistently tested in interviews.
Company-specific SQL filtering for Airbnb, Uber, Netflix. Real interview questions with solutions.
Data science interview platform with SQL, Python, and ML questions. Take-home challenges included.
Free SQL practice with FAANG questions. Created by ex-Facebook authors of Ace the Data Science Interview.
Written by ex-Amazon Bar Raiser. Sent by recruiters to candidates. 100+ candidates credit it for getting hired.
Insights from 500+ mock Amazon behavioral interviews. STARI method with Action at 50-60%.
Googleyness traits: comfort with ambiguity, bias for action, intellectual humility.
Official 16 principles with explanations. Customer Obsession, Ownership, Invent and Simplify, etc.
Ultimate guide to business case interviews. AARRR framework, metrics, diagnostic approaches.
Three games framework: Attention, Transaction, Productivity. Real examples from Facebook, Airbnb, Spotify.
31 leaked Meta interview questions. Product sense and SQL focus.
Offer Negotiation
Resources for evaluating and negotiating tech offers. Can mean $50K-$150K difference in first-year compensation.
Only guide specifically for Applied Scientist roles. 400+ FAANG negotiations. Includes exact salary bands (Amazon L5: $170-220K base, $351-588K equity). Sign-ons can reach $100K+ with proper leverage.
Complete framework for total compensation negotiation: base, equity valuation (public vs startup), signing bonuses, level negotiation. Harvard Career Services recommended. Helped one executive secure $5.4M more.
Gold standard negotiation guide from ex-poker player who negotiated $250K at Airbnb for first tech job. Game-theory approach: information control, BATNA development, handling exploding offers.
From platform that helped negotiate $31M+ in raises. Covers total comp breakdown, equity at public vs private companies, leveling systems, location impact. Companion database has 75K+ verified data points.
Word-for-word scripts from platform with 94% success rate and $50K average gain. Exposes recruiter psychology and information-extraction tactics. Includes Meta-specific playbook.
Visa & Immigration
H-1B sponsorship, green cards, and immigration resources for international candidates.
4.8M+ LCA records from 2013-2025. Search by company, job title, city, year. Pre-built searches for Google, Meta, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, OpenAI, Nvidia. Critical for negotiation.
First-person account navigating H-1B lottery multiple times. Covers H-1B, L-1A/B, O-1, E-3, TN, EB green cards. Strategy: start at large companies for L-1B transfer eligibility.
Updated 2025 list with approval numbers. Beyond FAANG: Stripe (100% approval), Databricks (300+ approvals), consulting firms. Includes 2025 policy changes and $100K fee update.
Perfect for PhD economists. Created by successful self-petitioners. Includes actual petition documents, Matter of Dhanasar framework, concurrent filing strategy. No employer sponsorship required.
Official interactive tool. Query by fiscal year, employer, city, NAICS code. Shows approval AND denial rates by employer. Identifies smaller sponsors beyond big tech. Updated quarterly.