Arsenal FC AI Research Engineer job posting
careers.arsenal.com
careers.arsenal.com
I’m Chris, Head of Analytics at Arsenal and hiring manager for this role (https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-dove-43b7a85)
I’m happy to answer any questions about the role, our department, football analytics, working at Arsenal, etc.
Does your team and department taking of analytics primarily on the footballing side? Like player performance? How does your teams work typically get incorporated and what does the day to day look like? Do you manage your own tech stack as well?
> Does your team and department taking of analytics primarily on the footballing side? Like player performance?
Yes, we work primarily on the footballing side and across the spectrum in that space: Player/team performance for the men's first team, women's first team, and boys academy age groups U16 and up, player recruitment / squad planning, etc.
> How does your teams work typically get incorporated
We produce a mix of interactive tools, regular static reports (e.g. opposition analysis, post-match analysis, etc.), and live dashboards that come from specific stakeholder requests such as coaching staff or execs, or that we build proactively to address a specific football-related question.
> what does the day to day look like?
It really varies from day to day and role to role within the team. A data engineer might be adding another data provider to an entity resolution ETL pipeline, a research scientist might be incorporating feedback from first team coaching staff into a work-in-progress model, a data analyst might be putting together an in-depth opposition analysis report for an upcoming match, and an operations analyst might be helping train operators on a new data labeling task.
> Do you manage your own tech stack as well?
We do manage most of our tech stack, although we get a lot of support on front-end from a great sister team in the IT dept.
Regardless of their sophistication, 3rd party data products in football tend to rely on manually collected and maintained player metadata. It can be unreliable. If I could reliably have a durable unique ID for every player, manager, and team in world football along with reliable timestamps for every moment each said player entered and left play, that would be pretty great. When joining together disparate data sources, discrepancies in things this simple cause all sorts of pain downstream.
https://moj-analytical-services.github.io/splink/
(Disclaimer: I am the lead author, but the tool is FOSS)
As in, perhaps decisions about unexpected red cards ?
It has already had a big impact for ball crossing the goal line judgments if you put computer vision in the broader AI category (e.g. Hawkeye in the PL)
It's a similar conflict of interest, if not outright corruption as Justice Clarence Thomas getting free all expenses paid fishing trips and other goodies from a billionaire who wants to influence Supreme Court decisions.
It was mainly sneaking in some levity.
That call was poor.
I also work in IT, albeit in a different field, mostly with Kubernetes clusters, DevOps tools and private clouds. Is your team working with these technologies, does Arsenal have some separate team for this sort of infrastructure-related work? I won't lie, from time to time I check Arsenal job postings but I never once saw anything related to the infra, which is why I'm asking.
Saka isn't all that either, he'd be nothing within Odegaard.
(this is convincing, and I know about as much as the IT Crowd did)
Good luck with your search!
I know you're kinda joking, but it's just so HN :)
* (pun not intended, but sort of proud of it now)
But I suspect they're just like all the others -- looking for credentialling where it doesn't yet exist.
[Guess we'll find out... not holding my breath for what would be a dream for us both]
While living off of porridge shouldn’t be necessary, I will say the porridge at the training ground is absolutely top tier.
150k a year puts you in the 1% earners in UK, plenty to comfortable live on.
As you mentioned, having such a job in ones CV can only help.
But, I've been a Chelsea fan for most of my life, if I take such a job at Arsenal and do it properly, I'll be actively working against the organization that brought me so many emotions over the past 30ish years.
But I’m pretty sure Brad got Jonah Hill for much less.
If there would be opportunities to present to Mikel Arteta and other high level football personnel, that would also be very motivating beyond raw salary.
Aside from 3rd party data, we contract with a nonprofit in Laos where operators collect event data for us (~2000 data points per match) across roughly a dozen leagues worldwide.
We also extract player tracking data from video.
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2014/oct/17/arsenal-pla...
If that is just salary though, it might be competitive in London depending on the rest of the comp package (i.e. about the same again for equity, 20-25% bonus - so total about 300-325k GBP - would be Ok for mid/senior level IME)
I'm also guessing that salaries in football might be suppressed similar to video games jobs. There'll be a lot of people willing to work under market rate because they enjoy the football environment.
I can do jobs like this one but I can’t consider any job offers for less than 500k (total comp).
Are houses and private schools cheaper in London?
Also, housing in much of the US is criminally expensive, and some people have unreasonably snobby attitudes about what constitutes a “decent area” in the US. Or maybe he was just making an understated and backhanded joke about the London housing market, which I’ve heard to be similarly absurd.
No matter how absurd it is, Ive never heard of a 6k per month mortgage, that is absolutely insane.
I live in NYC, on the UWS, in a nice (but not extravagant) 2 bedroom apartment. It’s about 1000 sq feet, and I pay $5k per month in rent. Buying a similar place in my neighborhood would cost me literally double that per month, after putting down $300k or more. My neighborhood has hundreds of thousands of people in it, all paying similar amounts (or much much more). My building has about 60 units, and I live in one of the smaller ones. Almost half of the units rent for $12k-15k per month. This is just one of hundreds of buildings in my neighborhood alone, one of thousands in Manhattan.
Of the ~350 apartments with at least 3 bedrooms for sale right in my neighborhood, only 77 cost less than $3mm. There are 52 for sale for more than $10mm, and those will almost all sell.
The average price for a terraced house in london zone 2 is £1.7 million
I have a feeling that data is wrong. If it's accurate it's definitely been pushed up by huge outliers on the top end (like £50+M properties in Chelsea and west ken that are zone 2)
I think the median zone 2 terraced house is more like £1m, can't find a statistic but I just bought a £1.5m house in hackney and there were 10 £1-1.3m properties for every £1.7m+
Still, a £1.3m house isn't completely infeasible in London :-).
I mean in a year, thats $144k.
The median price of American homes is $400k. In California it's $860k. In the Bay Area it's $1.5MM. You can get a house in the Bay Area for under $1.8MM, but you need a $360k down payment, and you will likely face a tradeoff between good schools, safe neighborhoods, being within walking distance of anything, and having a nice sized house. Outside of NYC, these numbers are the upper echelon. If you disagree, you have very expensive taste masquerading as requirements.
On that point about home sizes, Americans are frequently surprised how much less space Europeans are fine living in.
> 6k mortgage for a modest house in any decent area in US
I really dont consider a $1.8MM or $2.25MM house to be 'modest' by any stretch of the imagination.
and then another post after that said:
> 6k a month mortgage for a family of four seems low. It's at least double that in any major metro area.
so $1.8MM for a 'modest' house for a family of four is low in the US?
Im so confused, are people just so out of touch with reality that they think these prices are normal, or have I missed something along the way?
A “modest” house to me is a median house: around 2k sqft, run-of-the-mill construction, cheap materials, 8 feet ceilings, <10k sqft lot.
This is the reality in good parts of US.
They are cheaper than that everywhere in the world. I think you need to realise that you are in the upper 0.001% of earners in the world and your expenses to the rest of us seem absolutely ridiculous.
$6k per month mortgage?
My entire expenses are less than half that, I have 2 kids and I consider myself to be middle class and doing ok.
That said, people do it:
1. What constitutes a “decent area” varies from person to person.
2. My kid goes to private school (at more $5k per month), but some people live in districts where public schools are great.
3. Living in a no income tax state helps a lot too.
I could see a family being just fine on $10k per month take-home if they bought their house awhile ago, kids go to public school, they travel domestically, etc.
My entire expenses are $3k per month.
You guys are just in a completely different world.
The grass is always greener...
Second, this is absolutely wild to me. Is this your monthly expenses? I live in a pretty decent sized city in the UK and my mortgage is just under 1k per month. There's no way I could even attempt to spend 2k a month on food. That said I don't send my kids to private school, the state schools in my area are very good.
The idea of earning anywhere close to 500k is utterly mind boggling to me.
As far as income is concerned, some of us have the skills to demand that kind of comp even in the current job market, but it's rare - and more rare now than it was 2-3 years ago.
As far as expenses, it's trivially easy to slash those expenses by about a factor of 3 by living somewhere other than one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the US, and in an area with a decent public school system. 2k/month on food is also insane even for a family of 4 and implies a lot of eating out. I feed myself and my fiancée on about $450/month even buying fairly expensive ingredients, but I enjoy cooking.
Some people are just used to a certain lifestyle and are able to support it, so they consider changing it to be unthinkable. I make similar to what the person you're replying to probably makes, but my expenses are about ~$65k/year, and that includes a decent amount of spending that I consider frivolous. It would not be hard to slash another $10k/year off of that with minimal sacrifice. Not until going down toward $50k/year or below would I have to start making serious compromises.
Source: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-the-income-needed-to...
Several millions of people in US make more than 500k, so it’s not really that rare.
$450/mo on food is probably insane for a homeless person in US, or for an average person in Uganda. Why not slash this amount to, say, $50? I’m sure you can do it if you decide to grow your own food on some remote land. Why don’t you “change your lifestyle”?
I spend 2k roughly 50/50 on groceries and eating out. Nothing fancy.
Bottom line: should I move to a shitty area, put my kids to a shitty school, and cook more (which I do not enjoy)? Why? So that whoever owns arsenal can buy an even bigger superyacht next year?
the average UK salary is £32k. in London your average midlevel engineer salary band is 60-75k. Senior band is 75-110 - this includes principles and directors as well. For total comp add 10% of bonus. given anemic uk tech sector most stock is yeah worthless so let's not count it - unless you work for Wise, Revolut etc.
the people making big bucks i.e £200k+ in tech - are in finance / hft / trading firms. then in government consulting.
As A WHAT now?
Other than that, pretty cool to see. I’ll have to pass :)
Soccermatics course[0], the book of the same name[1], R code [2] and some more general resources [3].
Learn Python and Data Science With Football[4] and Python library for plotting football charts[5].
Machine learning Fantasy Premier League team [6] and Python for Fantasy Football [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15]
[0] https://soccermatics.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26073086-soccermatics
[2] https://github.com/JoGall/soccermatics
[3] https://github.com/eddwebster/football_analytics
[5] https://mplsoccer.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
[6] https://github.com/alan-turing-institute/AIrsenal
[7] http://www.fantasyfutopia.com/python-for-fantasy-football-in...
[8] http://www.fantasyfutopia.com/python-for-fantasy-football-ma...
[9] http://www.fantasyfutopia.com/python-for-fantasy-football-ge...
[10] http://www.fantasyfutopia.com/python-for-fantasy-football-ap...
[11] http://www.fantasyfutopia.com/python-for-fantasy-football-in...
[12] http://www.fantasyfutopia.com/python-for-fantasy-football-ad...
[13] http://www.fantasyfutopia.com/python-for-fantasy-football-un...
[14] http://www.fantasyfutopia.com/python-for-fantasy-football-fe...
[15] http://www.fantasyfutopia.com/python-for-fantasy-football-ra...