Where Are Data Science Jobs Located?
You want to get a data science job, but do you have to move to the San Francisco area to get it?
Obviously a great deal of tech companies (from the Facebooks and Netflixes of the world all the way down to startups that started last week) are located in the San Fran area so it makes sense that there will be a big pull for data scientists there. Add to the mix that a big proportion of venture capital money is in that area, and it really does make it seem like that’s the only place to get a data science job.
Of course, there’s also New York City with it’s media, fashion, and finance centers as well as smattering of high profile Venture Capital funds. Outside of the US you also see Data Science job opportunities in larger cities - Shanghai, Paris, Tokyo, London, etc... Big cities with big industries with big goals and large data sets.
What if you don’t want to live in a huge city?
Just because you want to get a data science job, shouldn’t automatically mean that you have to move to a big city. Of course, where there is a higher concentration of companies, you’ll find a higher concentration of potential job opportunities. But that doesn’t mean that there are zero opportunities outside of big cities.
Data science jobs are located everywhere!
They really are. Of course, sometimes they go by names as "quantitative analyst" or "statistical programmer" or "applied statistician" or "analytics engineer" instead of "data scientists". They are there and they are waiting for you to apply!
Show, don’t tell - where the data science jobs are located...
To show you, here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to look at the LinkedIn job site and look at the first 5 pages of search results for the keyword "data scientist". Then we’ll put together a list of cities that appeared. The results may vary when you are reading this, as this search is being done today (December 10, 2014).
Note:, though we are only going to do LinkedIn, here are a list of recommended job websites you should take a look at...
- https://www.linkedin.com (what we’re using in this article)
- http://www.indeed.com
- http://careers.stackoverflow.com
- http://www.careerbuilder.com
- http://www.glassdoor.com
LinkedIn Data Science Job Locations
The URL that we’ll use is the following one => https://www.linkedin.com/job/ and the search will be for "data scientist". Note, this search is based on "united states" as the country because my IP and cookies are all based in the United States.
Here are the cities in order that they show up. If they show up more than once, then I just add an "x 2" if it shows up twice. Remember, this list is only the first 5 pages... It is ordered by the number of times the city shows up, and then once we get into cities that only showed up once, they are ordered alphabetically.
- San Francisco, CA x13
- New York City, NY x11
- Chicago, IL x5
- Mountain View, CA x4
- Atlanta, GA x3
- Dallas/Fort Worth, TX x3
- San Mateo, CA x3
- Waltham, MA x3
- Washington, DC x3
- Boston, MA x2
- Cambridge, MA x2
- Denver, CO x2
- Los Angeles, CA x2
- Philadelphia, PA x2
- Portland, OR x2
- San Jose, CA x2
- Santa Clara, CA x2
- Sunnyvale, CA x2
- Aliso Viejo, CA
- Ambler, PA
- Austin, TX
- Baltimore, MD
- Bellevue, WA
- Bloomingdale, IL
- Charlotte, NC
- Chevy Chase, MD
- Clark, NJ
- Detroit, MI
- Franklinton, NC
- Houston, TX
- King of Prussia, PA
- Los Gatos, CA
- Manassas, VA
- McLean, VA
- Menlo Park, CA
- Minneapolis, MN
- Nashville, TN
- Needham, MA
- Olathe, KS
- Palo Alto, CA
- Pittsburg, PA
- Redwood City, CA
- Ridge, NY
- San Bruno, CA
- San Diego, CA
- Santa Monica, CA
- Scottsdale, AZ
- Seattle, WA
- Spokane, WA
- Tampa, FL
- Teaneck, NJ
- Truckee, CA
52 Cities!
As you can see, just on LinkedIn, in the first 5 pages of search results for Data Science jobs, there are 52 cities listed. Of course, though San Francisco (and surrounding cities) show up many times, you can see that once we get into the cities that only showed up once, there really are data science jobs all over the United States. Obviously, if you want to work in a town with less than 2,000 people, it might be very tough to do, but you can always work remotely.
So, when looking for a data science job, don’t think you have to move to the San Francisco area or New York to get it. Take a look at the above websites and see what you can find.
Get to it and good luck!