Replica is an enterprise data platform that delivers critical insights about the built environment. With better data, human-context and an intuitive design, Replica helps public and private sectors make informed, effective, and responsive decisions. By showing how people live, move and work, we contextualize hard choices, allowing our clients to see around corners and understand the trade-offs surrounding their decisions. Whether for a city planner increasing public transit to underserved neighborhoods or for a grocery chain evaluating where to open a new location, Replica’s insights lets clients make more informed, people-centered decisions. 

We spun out of Alphabet in 2019 when we secured series A funding from venture firms such as Innovation Endeavors, Firebrand Ventures, and Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund. Today, we are a team of ~30 employees with offices in San Francisco, CA and Overland Park, KS.

We value our customers, believe in being resourceful, and work in service of each other to scale our product. As we build our team, we are committed to pursuing and bringing together a diverse workforce and creating an environment of inclusion. We value our differences and we encourage all to apply. We are committed to equal opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, gender, gender identity, parental or pregnancy status, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, Veteran status, or any other status protected by the laws or regulations in the locations where we operate. 

The Team

The Research and Development (R&D) focuses on designing and implementing travel modeling algorithms using very large data sets. The R&D team-- a team of research scientists-- has a collective background in statistics, machine learning, and travel demand modeling. At Replica, they work most closely with engineering to productionize R&D initiatives. 

The Role

We’re looking for a Research Scientist with experience designing and implementing algorithms within distributed data processing and modeling pipelines. You will be a part of the R&D team responsible for developing production-grade urban mobility models that capture behavioral choices of city dwellers in a privacy-preserving way.

• Within your first month, you will build a deep understanding of Replica’s data protection and location privacy principles, technology infrastructure, modeling approaches, coding style and standards, and have contributed several features to our model calibration code base.
• By the end of month 3, you will be contributing to the implementation of a range of optimization algorithms, enforcing modeling accuracy, performance and scalability.
• By the end of month 6, you will have significantly contributed to our model estimation and calibration framework, proposed significant novel scalable approaches, and led their implementation, increasing modeling realism and accuracy.
• By the end of year 1, your work will have enabled new applications and novel use cases at scale, accuracy and realism never achieved in urban modeling before.

Requirements

• Know your science: applied optimization is your bread and butter. A graduate degree (MS or PhD) in operations research, computer science, computational math or other relevant field and 3+ years of experience in professional practice.
• You are highly skilled in software development and an expert in applied math, statistics and optimization tools in Python ecosystem (numpy/scipy/pandas). Modeling fast changing cities requires solving myriads of optimization problems, oftentimes formulated from the first principles.
• Hands-on knowledge of machine learning algorithms, both deep and shallow, interest or prior experience in reinforcement learning, multi-agent systems and modern AI is a plus. You are excited to train artificial agents that respond to changing travel conditions, new urban infrastructure, and updated public policies in city-wide simulations.
• Have strong collaboration and communication skills, be capable of explaining complex models to a wide audience.
• Bias towards action and shipping. You will work with production engineering team building infrastructure and scaling your algorithms to model some of the largest metropolitan regions in the world.
• Care about the future of cities, and our team’s success in radically improving the quality of urban life.

What We Value

• Privacy. This is at the core of everything we do, so we value experience working to ensure data privacy.
• Deep travel model expertise. You have demonstrated experience with travel model specification, estimation and validation. 
• Curiosity. Our work requires solving a myriad of interrelated modeling problems, often starting from or near scratch. Ask hard questions and challenge assumptions to ensure that we’re solving the right problems.
• Team. Our shared ambition for the company’s success comes before our personal ambition or desire for individual success.
• Passion for urban planning. We care deeply about cities and providing the tools to help them make the best decisions

Benefits

• Our people! We work as a team and are excited to contribute to city planning. 
• Competitive salary based on experience and potential for impact.
• Equity at an early stage startup.
• Health benefits including medical, dental, vision, and HSA option. 
• 401k account + employer contribution.
• Offices in San Francisco, CA and Overland Park, KS.
• Flexible PTO.

If you don't think you meet all of the criteria above, but still are interested in the job, please apply. Nobody checks every box, and we're looking for someone excited to join the team.