Senior Quantitative Scientist

About Us:

Gro Intelligence is a rapidly growing, mission-driven software company that is creating a more connected and productive global agriculture industry.  We are an incredibly diverse team of technologists, scientists, and academics with a shared passion for building software that impacts everyone in the world on the most basic level.  
 
Our products make high quality agricultural data available to everyone, including many of the world’s largest companies and non-government organizations, who rely on our data to understand and predict the availability and price of food on a global basis.  We do this by standardizing huge volumes of structured and unstructured data, then transforming it into actionable knowledge for large corporate agribusinesses, financial institutions, consulting firms, and non-profit organizations.  With offices in both New York and Nairobi, and the financial backing of prominent investors including TPG Growth and Data Collective, Gro is rapidly building out our team to continue this mission. 

We are looking for highly-motivated, intellectually curious people who are hungry for personal growth. Successful candidates have versatile talents and are excited to work in a fast-paced, demanding, and constantly evolving entrepreneurial environment. We are hiring a Senior Quantitative Scientist to join our headquarters in New York City.

Responsibilities:

Cross-functional role, working with engineering, product, geospatial teams; but also research analysts and biz dev teams.  Expectation of leadership and management. 

• Quantitative insights - automated analysis & “emergent” agricultural insights/alerts
  • Current “Gro insights” are thematic written pieces where content is supported by Gro data.  Quantitative insights would be the reverse, data driven and emergent, supported by content. Working with Research Analysts and Geospatial Analysts.
• Next Gen Data Quality Czar
  • Gro has basic infrastructure to evaluate coverage and detect some classes of obvious errors.   Working with Software Engineers. 
• Gro Modeling Eval / Experimental Framework
  • Gro makes ML-based forecast models for e.g. agricultural yields of different crops in different regions, drought indexes. Develop a robust framework to evaluate quality of models and predictions. 
• Advanced Gro Derived data series 
  • “Gro Derived” are new data series we create in the product from combinations of data from different sources. For example, combining demographic and food production data to have more actionable data series; or geospatially weighted environmental data, like rainfall average for areas covered by specific crops. Beyond the basic temporal and geospatial combinations, create Gro Derived series based on more advanced stats.  Working with Software Engineers.
• Special research projects

Qualifications:

• Technical leadership experience
• Very strong understanding of statistics and mathematics
• Strong computer science fundamentals (data structures and algorithms)
• Very proficient in at least one of: Python, Java, C++, R
• Experience with large scale systems, parallel computing, distributed storage
• Bachelor's level degree in computer science, engineering, math or related field
• 5+ years of relevant experience

Bonus Points:

• Familiarity with statistical modeling tools (R, MatLab)
• Experience with natural language processing (NLP)
• Experience using RESTful APIs
• Graduate degree / Research experience