Data Scientist at Blue Rose Research

Blue Rose Research is a project with OpenLabs to develop a wide range of cutting-edge products used by the most important progressive organizations in the country. Our research undergirds short-term and long-term strategy for advancing progressive causes and has a trusted track record among key decision makers.
The R&D team within Blue Rose Research has a storied history, and has worked with central players to develop strategy and direct hundreds of millions of dollars of resources. The work produced by the team is widely regarded as among the most technically sophisticated in the space. If you join us, you’ll be plugging into a diverse team of decorated engineers, PhD data scientists and political insiders who are closely connected to some of the most important decision makers in the progressive ecosystem.
We are looking for a data scientist to help develop applied statistical models and own end-to-end pipelines that will enable us to deliver daily insights and guidance to key clients this election cycle. This role requires full-stack data science skills, and will closely collaborate with our interdisciplinary team to scope technical needs, contribute new functionality to our machine learning framework, wrangle messy data and write ETL, train and iterate on models, and own modeling output that will be delivered to client-facing stakeholders.
We’re a fast and dynamic team, and you’ll be contributing to innovative work that evolves week by week. We’re looking for you to bring your passion for data science, a strong attention to detail, and a desire to make a big impact — sometimes under tight timelines.  
We offer a competitive salary, medical, dental, and health benefits, and a work environment that will support your differences. While the work is remote most of the team is NYC based, and as COVID wanes that will likely be a center of gravity for our team.
You will:

Help build out a suite of end-to-end modeling pipelines to produce high-quality estimates of public opinion and voter behavior at a rapid cadence. Improve pipeline reliability, data quality checks, and model diagnostics to increase confidence in our modeling outputs.
Conduct modeling experiments, do feature engineering, and contribute new ideas to improve our core data science approach. Our problems are not well suited to plug and play machine learning solutions and we often have to think creatively about the right ways to evaluate model performance.
Deliver actionable guidance to important internal stakeholders, helping them understand nuances of the model output.
Build subject matter context and think critically about what the data is saying to understand what’s a real trend versus what’s a potential bug.

Our ideal candidate likely:

Has 2+ years of professional data science and/or machine learning experience
Has significant experience with applied statistics and predictive modeling. Has developed strong instincts about how to select the right modeling approach for a problem, tune models, evaluate model performance, and diagnose and debug modeling issues. Hands-on experience with Bayesian methods is a plus but not required.
Has experience with SQL and relational databases. Can quickly orient themselves to a new dataset, perform exploratory analysis, spot data quality issues, and justify decisions about how to handle imperfect data. Experience working with political data specifically is helpful, but not required.
Has experience building and owning production-level modeling pipelines using real-world data.
Is a strong Python programmer, or has significant experience in R and a willingness to learn Python. Experience with Tensorflow or similar tools like PyTorch (or a desire to learn) is a plus but not required.
Can pull out insights from data and build a story around them, and create effective visualizations to communicate those findings (in matplotlib, ggplot, or similar).
Thrives in multi-disciplinary teams working with engineers, statisticians and political experts. Is excited about working with less technical stakeholders and seeing how their work impacts real-world decision making.
Willingness to engage with the wider progressive political ecosystem and develop domain knowledge in addition to technical insight. 
Has strong oral and written communication skills, especially in a remote environment
Is a kind person and a team player who contributes to a warm working environment

We don’t expect every applicant to have expertise in every area listed above. We encourage you to apply if you don’t feel your experience and background sound like a perfect fit. Many of our team members have taken an unusual path to get to where they are today, and our unique and diverse perspectives make us more effective. We also believe strongly in our team’s ability to learn and excel at new skills and challenges. Join us!
The salary range for this position is $130,000 - $170,000 annually, commensurate with experience.
Candidates must be authorized to work lawfully in the United States.