What are the responsibilities and job description for the Senior Applied Scientist position at Afresh?
About the role
Afresh builds replenishment technology using AI models that are directly responsible for ordering millions of dollars of fresh inventory across the world every day. Fresh food ordering is an extremely complex high-dimensional decision-making problem. We face the complex challenges presented by decaying product, uncertain shelf lives, varying consumer demand, stochastic arrival times, extreme weather events, and tight performance constraints (to name a few). We tackle these problems with a mix of machine learning, large-scale simulation, and optimization technologies. Our team has presented work at multiple industry leading conferences, and we encourage team members to write and present their work publicly.
As an Applied Scientist at Afresh focused on inventory, you will take your existing knowledge of machine learning, operations research, or statistics and apply it to the challenge of inventory estimation for perishables. You will thrive in this role if you love to work on applied, open-ended problems in research and production environments: thorough error analysis, deep understanding of the data you are modeling, feature selection, algorithm implementation, hyperparameter optimization, deployment, and production modeling. We are looking for someone who is equally adept at gaining insights from 8 hours of data analysis or 8 hours of reading papers.
- You will work on improving the accuracy and calibration of our probabilistic inventory models that power our store-level ordering products. You will also drive research development for new product and business challenges.
- In your first 3 months, you will acquire a comprehensive understanding of our current inventory system and modern computational approaches to large scale simulation. You will gain proficiency in our data manipulation, transformation, and estimation, and you’ll test an experimental improvement to our inventory system.
- By the end of your first 6 months, you will have proposed, implemented, and rigorously validated an improvement to either inventory estimation, inventory count targeting, or food waste measurement.
- By the end of your first year, you will have launched fundamental changes to our core inventory system and led research into extensions like anytime inventory estimation.
- We need to make optimal ordering decisions for millions of items for weeks at a time, and our system must be fault-tolerant to an extreme. Our partners rely on our system to order millions of dollars of inventory every week, and so your code must be rigorously validated, tested, and bug-proof.
- 4 years of industrial or academic experience building mission-critical applied systems.
- Excellent communication and presentation skills. You should be able to explain complex mathematical ideas to product teams in plain English.
- 4 years of experience with Python libraries like Pytorch, Sklearn and Ray.
- Fluent in programmatic data analysis using SQL and Pandas.
- Excellent data visualization skills.
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