About Opendoor:  

Founded in 2014, Opendoor’s mission is to empower everyone with the freedom to move. We 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 fast. We 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 transactions. But the work is far from over as we continue to grow in new markets. Transforming the real estate industry takes tenacity and dedication. It takes problem solvers and builders. It 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 one.  So where do you fit in? Whether you’re passionate about real estate, people, numbers, words, code, or strategy -- we have a place for you. Real estate is broken. Come help us fix it.

About the Role: As a Senior Research Engineer, you will demonstrate data breakthroughs for Opendoor. You will create and develop frameworks and model prototypes that fuel breakthroughs in our ability to model home prices and market trends. Projects 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. 

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 pricing. You can learn more about OVM, the Opendoor Valuation Model, on our blog.

As a Research Engineer, you will:

• Build and evolve models that drive massive customer impact
• Collaborate with research scientists to prototype and productionize improvements to our core valuation model
• Identify opportunities at all stages of the modeling lifecycle, including new models, new data sources, enhancements to models, and rapid feedback loops
• 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:

• Extensive experience building production software integrated with machine learning systems
• Knowledge of recent advancements in deep learning, both theoretical and applied
• Experience with container platforms like Docker, and DAG orchestration tools such as AirflowAbility to quickly (1-2 weeks) build proofs of concept and identify the highest-leverage areas to iterate efficiently
• Experience building and deploying production models using deep learning frameworks such as Pytorch or Tensorflow (we use Pytorch + Lightning)
• Strong knowledge of statistics and machine learning
• Highly effective verbal and written communication skills

Bonus points:

• 5+ years of machine learning 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)
• Experience working with temporal holdout sets in machine learning or statistical models (e.g. time series forecasts)
• A public portfolio of full-stack data products, demos, or blog posts 

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.

Our team celebrates our diverse backgrounds. We believe that being open about who we are and what we do allows us to be better. Individuals 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 ordinances. For California residents: for more information about the categories of personal information that we collect for recruiting purposes, please see our personnel Privacy Policy.