What do your data analysts/scientists do on a normal basis? I just sent in my applications to both because it sounds like the technical experimenting I loved doing during my graduate school.

Excellent question! I work on the data team here, and we work on a variety of projects. Some of our features rely on data from our applications, and so we help develop those features by building our data models. On the other hand, some other projects, like our recent infographic[1], are open-ended - you have the freedom to come up with your own hypotheses and test them against our data.

If you have a good background in data munging and analysis, it's incredibly fun work - a nice mix between the creativity of investigating problems that interest you and the rigor of data science.

[1] http://blog.foursquare.com/2011/06/20/holysmokes10millionpeo...

To add to what chimeracoder said above: a lot of our products are data driven. The prime example is Explore, our recommendation engine. It recommends places that you might want to go to, based on your past checkin history, your friends' checkin histories, the checkin history of the venues you've been to or might go to, the time of day, etc. Other examples of data-driven products include our venue search, friend recommendations, etc.

In addition to working on our data-driven products, the data team also analyzes and visualizes the critical business metrics that keep the company and the executive team informed about the state of the of the business and help us make data-informed decisions about our products and our business priorities.

In terms of the day-to-day, this might involve writing Hadoop jobs (or more likely Hive queries), wrangling data in Ruby or Python, working with business or product leads to understand how things are performing, and coming up with new things to pay attention to in our data and more insightful ways to look at it.