The Prediction and Planning team at Afresh plays a fundamental role in realizing our company mission: reducing global food waste. Afresh’s grocery store partners rely on our team’s models to guide critical replenishment decisions on millions of dollars of fresh inventory every day. This is not an easy task: we face complex challenges presented by stochastic inventory decay, varying consumer demand, extreme population events (e.g. Covid), tight performance constraints, incomplete and noisy data, just to name a few. The Prediction and Planning team tackles these problems with a mix of machine learning, large-scale simulation, and optimization techniques. The result: a product that has saved tens of millions of pounds of food from going to waste. And we’re just getting started.

As the Director of this team, you will manage, lead, and grow a talented group that is responsible for researching, designing, building, and deploying our models all the way to production. You will work with the team to set the long term vision and strategy; lead research efforts to improve system performance; work closely with product and commercial teams to understand and manage priorities and tradeoffs; and play a critical part in scaling our impact to billions of pounds of food saved.

Our team culture is part research, part engineering. We hold daily coffee hours to encourage open-ended discussion on topics ranging from new research papers to design reviews. We are also engineers: we love seeing the real-world impact of deploying our work to production, and we proudly enforce rigorous standards on our code, data, and models. 

What you will do

• Lead and manage a team that is responsible for the models that power our core product
• Help develop the team’s long term technical vision and roadmap
• Direct day-to-day execution by participating in technical and design discussions
• Provide technical and career guidance as a mentor and coach 
• Define, recruit, and hire the roles needed to achieve our vision
• Represent and advocate for the team to other parts of the organization
• Develop and build engineering and company strategy, processes, and organizational structures as we scale
• Foster a culture of excellence, curiosity, collaboration, proactivity, candor, humility, and kindness

What skills or experience do you need?

• 10+ years of technical experience in engineering systems that deal with large-scale decision-making under uncertainty (e.g., ad-serving, supply-chain optimization, pricing optimization, etc.)
• 5+ years as a people manager, with experience and skills in people development, coaching, mentorship, hiring, planning, and prioritization
• 2+ years managing multiple teams
• Demonstrated experience designing, building, and deploying products to end customers
• Excellent communication and presentation skills. You should be able to explain complex mathematical ideas to product teams and translate business requirements into technical ones.

Preferred Qualifications:

• MS or PhD degree
• Experience with logistics, supply-chain optimization, probabilistic forecasting, numerical simulation, or a related field is a plus

• The above represent attributes our ideal candidate possesses. We encourage all highly-qualified candidates to apply, even if they do not fulfill all the listed criteria.

Founded in 2017, Afresh is the first A.I.-powered fresh food optimization platform for grocery chains. We have partnered with several large grocers representing hundreds of stores and >$10B in revenue. Our cutting-edge AI research has been published in top journals (e.g., ICML). We’re backed by some of the top investors in grocery and tech including Innovation Endeavors (former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s firm), Baseline Ventures (first money in Stitch Fix, SoFi, Heroku, Instagram), Food Retail Ventures, Maersk Growth, and Impact Engine.

We are building a vibrant, diverse, and inclusive team that embodies our company’s values: proactivity, kindness, candor, and humility. We aspire to continually grow as individuals and as an organization to live these values and realize our mission. We earnestly believe that Afresh represents a one-of-a-kind opportunity to have massive social impact at scale by employing novel technology—and to have a ton of fun along the way.

Afresh provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, genetics, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, marital status, pregnancy or related condition, or any other basis protected by law