Job details
Job type full-time
Full job description
About opendoor: founded in 2014, opendoor’s mission is to empower everyone with the freedom to moveWe believe the traditional real estate process is broken and our goal is simple: build a digital, end-to-end customer experience that makes buying and selling a home simple, certain and fastWe have assembled a dedicated team with diverse backgrounds to support more than 100,000 homes bought and sold with us and the customers who have selected opendoor as a trusted partner in handling one of their largest financial transactionsBut the work is far from over as we continue to grow in new marketsTransforming the real estate industry takes tenacity and dedicationIt takes problem solvers and buildersIt takes a tight knit community of teammates doing the best work of their lives, pushing one another to transform a complicated process into a simple oneSo where do you fit in? whether you’re passionate about real estate, people, numbers, words, code, or strategy - we have a place for youReal estate is brokenCome help us fix it.
About the role: as a staff research scientist, you will demonstrate data breakthroughs for opendoorYou will create and develop a diverse portfolio of proofs of concept, balancing project risk versus potential impactYou have a portfolio mindset, minimizing risk by exploring a variety of uncorrelated projects, rigorously prioritizing projects given the uncertainty, and working inside fast feedback loopsProjects can range from step-function algorithmic improvements due to integrating new data sources to partial- or fully algorithmic automation of human processes, driving leveraged operational efficiencies.
Our teams: pricing prediction - responsible for all the core pricing prediction models, but in particular ovm (which predicts the value of a specific home right now) and hpa (which predicts the value of homes over time)If algorithmic pricing is the heart of opendoor, this is the heart of algorithmic pricingAdvanced resale optimization - our aro team optimally acquires an individual home and, once it’s acquired, will optimally resell an individual home given supply-demand, tradeoffs, etc portfolio construction - responsible for driving portfolio-wide optimization, including margin vsRevenue tradeoff, allocate fixed resources (e.gMarketing $$) to different markets, managing portfolio-wide risk given hpa forecast, etc.
As a research scientist, you will:
Build and evolve models that drive massive customer impact
Identify opportunities at all stages of the modeling lifecycle, including new models, new data sources, enhancements to models, and rapid feedback loops
Provoke trade-offs and prioritize work across a portfolio of potential projects based on impact and scope vsEffort and risk
Produce convincing structural and data-driven analyses to falsify ideas or move them forward
Clearly and concisely articulate the business impact of your work
Work pragmatically at a high cadence to ship modeling opportunities, such that we generate high learning throughput
We’re looking for teammates who have:
Adeptness in working with any kind of data (structured, unstructured, scraping, database tables, etc.)
Ability to create machine learning models to solve business problems, applying excellent business judgment and orientation toward impact
Proficiency in a programming language to be able to solve a business problem in a full-stack, data-driven way (scraping data, etl, web-hosted ml model)
Ability to quickly (1-2 weeks) build proofs of concept and identify the highest-leverage areas to iterate efficiently
Desire to identify, perform, and automate laborious work (e.gHand-labeling 100 examples to understand the job at hand, then systematizing the process)
Strong knowledge of statistics
Highly effective verbal and written communication skills
Bonus points:
6+ years of data science and generalist engineering experience over a diversity of products
A risk-aware, investor’s mindset (seeking out and placing bets on a portfolio of projects)
Proficiency in a relevant modeling or statistics specialization, such as macroeconomic modeling, portfolio optimization, stochastic modeling, or human-in-loop data enrichment
A public portfolio of full-stack data products, demos, or blog posts
More about us: want to learn more about us and how we are revolutionizing the home buying and selling process? learn more about us on our website, check out our profile on the muse to learn more about our culture from our team members, or read our blog posts to hear about the work we are doing.
We offer the following benefits and perks:
Full medical, dental, and vision with optional 70% coverage for dependents
Flexible vacation policy
Generous parental leave
Paid time off to volunteer
Please note that these benefits and perks are available only to full time team members and do not apply to contract roles.
Opendoor values openness: our team celebrates our diverse backgroundsWe believe that being open about who we are and what we do allows us to be betterIndividuals seeking employment at opendoor are considered without regards to race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or other protected status under all applicable laws, regulations, and ordinancesFor california residents: for more information about the categories of personal information that we collect for recruiting purposes, please see our personnel privacy policy.
