Senior Data Scientist - Climate Risk and Community Resilience

Looking for someone who has experienced many different types of climate and weather data. A great candidate should be very familiar with publicly-produced data and major labs that produce this data.

UrbanFootprint is the world’s first Urban Intelligence Platform. We provide critical intelligence to the institutions that are rebuilding the world's infrastructure. Where does the energy sector invest in electrification, decarbonization, and asset hardening in the face of climate threats? Where do cities and businesses invest to catch up with e-commerce, last-mile delivery, and new mobility? Where do governments deploy relief and new infrastructure to combat record hunger, homelessness, and hazard vulnerability? UrbanFootprint provides detailed and actionable answers to these questions and more.

UrbanFootprint supports organizations in ‘Building Resilience’.’ We organize, normalize, and align thousands of urban, climate, and community metrics across the continental U.S.. The platform delivers targeted insights via dynamic data streams and collaborative web mapping applications. We enable our customers to answer complex ‘where’ questions in minutes versus weeks, months, or years. Our customers include some of the largest energy utilities, major financial institutions, critical government agencies, top urban planning firms, and fast-growing mobility companies.

We’re growing rapidly in a market with a TAM of $22B, and just closed our Series B funding led by Citi Ventures, Valo Ventures, and Radicle Impact.Our founders, Joe DiStefano and Peter Calthorpe, are urban planning pioneers who have spent decades providing critical urban intelligence to cities and enterprises across the globe. UrbanFootprint was named one of the World’s Most Innovative companies in 2021, and is on the GovTech 100 list.  Our platform was awarded the top spot in FastCo’s Innovation by Design competition.

The role: 

As the Senior Data Scientist leading Climate Risk and Community Resilience, you will be driving the evolution of UrbanFootprint’s risk-based data products including Grid Resilience Insights and Municipal Bonds Insights.  These products are designed to help asset managers and financial institutions make investment decisions by taking into account climate and environmental hazard risk, community impacts and vulnerability, and physical infrastructure and the built environment.  These data products leverage our parcel-level map of all properties across the US to facilitate decision-making for scales ranging from parcels and neighborhoods to states and the entire US.

As a product-minded and pragmatic data science leader, you know how to appropriately scope projects to ensure we are delivering what customers need today, and have ideas for how we can improve in the future.  You are autonomous, not independent;  you work collaboratively with business partners to understand the ‘what’ and ‘why’ and take full ownership of figuring out ‘how’ to meet those needs.  You proactively communicate progress and are accountable for the validity and accuracy of all models produced for your data products.  You are a hands-on leader, able to build models and provide technical support and mentorship to junior data scientists.  

What you'll do: 

• Partner with product managers to develop and execute a technical roadmap for our Climate Risk and Resilience data products.
• Develop novel models and algorithms to help our customers face society’s pressing challenges of climate vulnerability and social inequity across multiple verticals.
• Identify, normalize, and analyze various environmental and climate hazard datasets to assess where risks are the highest.
• Partner with solutions analysts, customer success and product managers to help turn customers problems into actionable solutions.
• Help to define and communicate a quantified understanding of risk across multiple products.
• Own data science problems end-to-end, from ideation, exploratory data analysis and prototype, to collaborating with data engineers and machine learning engineers to ship models to production.

Your background most likely includes:

• Work experience equivalent to a Master’s degree or higher in Statistics, Data Science, or a branch of Environmental Sciences/GeoSciences, with experience working with geospatial (raster and vector) or spatiotemporal data
• Fluency in Python and Python’s scientific programming stack such as pandas, GeoPandas, rasterio, xarray, sklearn, pytorch, fastai, statsmodels, and various visualization packages including map-based visualizations.
• Practical experience with a wide variety of statistical and machine learning models such as statistical and machine learning regression models, geostatistics, downscaling and interpolation.
• Experience developing models in an iterative, fast-paced environment.
• Excellent communication, collaboration, and documentation skills.

Bonus qualifications: 

• Master’s degree or higher in Statistics, Data Science, Computer Science, Civil or Environmental Engineering, GeoSciences, or Urban Planning (with an emphasis on geospatial, spatiotemporal or machine learning modeling), or other similar technical fields.
• Experience working with publicly available climate and hazard data, including downscaled CMIP5 datasets (e.g., LOCA/MACA), NOAA flood hazard layers, and others.
• Experience developing quantitative impact estimates of climate change or extreme weather events such as infrastructure damage estimates, economic impacts and/or population impacts. 
• Deep experience with and knowledge of geospatial modeling and analysis including familiarity with raster rescaling, joining rasters to vector features, and spatiotemporal modeling.
• Experience as a full-stack data scientist, owning data pipelines, model development and production model implementation.
• Familiarity with large-scale data analysis frameworks including SQL, Apache Beam, Dask or PySpark.
• Passion for climate resilience, equity, urban planning, and leveraging data to facilitate a more equitable and resilient society.

UrbanFootprint is committed to diversity in its workforce. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, religion, creed, gender, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy, sex, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, citizenship, or any other legally protected class.

How to apply:

Please apply directly through the Urbanfootprint career page: 

https://boards.greenhouse.io/urbanfootprint/jobs/4490614004