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.
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...