Senior Research Scientist – Portfolio Construction

| San Francisco
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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 Team

As a Staff Research Scientist, you will demonstrate data breakthroughs for Opendoor. You will create and develop a diverse portfolio of proofs of concept, balancing project risk versus potential impact. You have a portfolio mindset, minimizing risk by exploring a variety of uncorrelated projects, rigorously prioritizing projects given the uncertainty, and working inside fast feedback loops. 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.


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 pricing.

Advanced 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 vs. revenue tradeoff, allocate fixed resources (e.g. marketing $$) to different markets, managing portfolio-wide risk given HPA forecast, etc.

Role Responsibilities

  • Define the data strategy, including creating metrics with existing systems to understand our products and policies, and designing the next generation intelligent systems to improve our real estate pricing and operations practices
  • Build models and policies to help teams achieve their business objectives
  • Design experiments and conduct causal inference to determine effect of our initiatives
  • Become a domain expert in real estate

Skills Needed

  • 5+ years of industry experience designing, developing and shipping ML systems, post academia
  • Advanced degree in a quantitative field
  • 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.g. hand-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 if

  • Fraud or incident detection
  • Working with hardware and sensor data
  • Time series analysis and forecasting 
  • Optimization under uncertainty and risk management

For CO Residents Only, and in accordance with C.R.S. Sec. 8-5-101 et seq., the minimum total compensation for this role is $425,000. The actual compensation packages are based on a wide array of factors unique to each candidate, including but not limited to skill set, years & depth of experience, certifications and specific office location. This may differ in other locations due to cost of employment considerations. For questions about this, our pay philosophy, and other available benefits, please speak to the recruiter if you decide to apply for the role and are selected for an interview. 


#LI-Remote

#LI-DB3


More About Us

To learn how we are reinventing the Real Estate industry check out our website, to hear about our culture directly from team members visit The Muse and to discover what we are building for our customers read our blog posts.


We Offer the Following Benefits and Perks

• Full medical, dental, and vision with optional 85% 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 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.


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Technology we use

  • Engineering
  • Product
  • Sales & Marketing
    • GolangLanguages
    • JavascriptLanguages
    • PythonLanguages
    • RLanguages
    • RubyLanguages
    • ScalaLanguages
    • ReactLibraries
    • Node.jsFrameworks
    • Ruby on RailsFrameworks
    • SparkFrameworks
    • PostgreSQLDatabases
    • SketchDesign
    • FigmaDesign
    • AsanaManagement
    • JIRAManagement
    • WordpressCMS

Location

San Francisco, CA

An Insider's view of Opendoor

What's the biggest problem your team is solving?

My team works with our sales and support operators. We manage our multiple telephony platforms, including our call center software. Last year, we replaced our old call center vendor solution with a new custom-built telephony platform. Building the unique features each team has been one of our central challenges for much of the past year.

Maggie

Sr. Software Engineer

How has your career grown since starting at the company?

I started at Opendoor as an intern, responsible for small improvements to our home valuation model’s accuracy. Now, I am one of the leaders on our team - I’m responsible for setting team vision, overseeing systems design for other IC’s, and leading P0 initiatives such as a pricing workflow overhaul that we launched after COVID-19.

Daniel

Software Engineer

How do you empower your team to be more creative?

Analytical problem solving requires creativity too. I always encourage my team to consider all the tradeoffs between different options - what if you need to solve the problem in 1 day? How about 6 months? How about unlimited compute resources? We often come up with more creative and better solutions when we intentionally consider all options.

Sherry

Data Science Manager

What are Opendoor Perks + Benefits

Culture
Volunteer in local community
OKR operational model
Team based strategic planning
Pair programming
Open office floor plan
Flexible work schedule
Diversity
Dedicated diversity and inclusion staff
Mandated unconscious bias training
Diversity employee resource groups
Hiring practices that promote diversity
Health Insurance & Wellness Benefits
Flexible Spending Account (FSA)
Disability insurance
Dental insurance
Vision insurance
Health insurance
Life insurance
Pet insurance
Wellness programs
Mental health benefits
Financial & Retirement
401(K)
Company equity
Employee stock purchase plan
Child Care & Parental Leave Benefits
Generous parental leave
Family medical leave
Adoption Assistance
Vacation & Time Off Benefits
Generous PTO
Paid volunteer time
Paid holidays
Paid sick days
Office Perks
Commuter benefits
Company-sponsored outings
Free snacks and drinks
Some meals provided
Company-sponsored happy hours
Relocation assistance
Home-office stipend for remote employees
Professional Development Benefits
Lunch and learns

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