Director of Synthetic Populations

We are looking for an individual contributor to lead the development of synthetic populations and data marketplace for the Epistemix platform. This role will report to our Director of Data Science & Engineering and work closely with the engineering and customer success teams. In this role, you will be expected to develop synthetic populations and APIs for external users to add their own data to the synthetic populations we make available on the platform. 

Another part of your role will be to develop training materials and documentation so we can grow a team around you over time. The ideal candidate is somebody who views building a synthetic population and ecosystem of contributors to the synthetic population as a data scientist’s dream job. Your curiosity around the opportunity to lead the development and standardization around synthetic populations will help unlock understanding and knowledge across disciplines that enable many solutions to be build on top of the part of our platform that you own. Your ability to advance this part of the platform provide the foundation for decisions across the world, and you will be expected to continually find new ways to represent reality within the synthetic population. As a key contributor within an early stage startup, you will have room to shape our data and pricing strategies while also serving as an evangelist for agent-based simulation across disciplines. 

We acknowledge this job spans the work of 2 roles, developing synthetic populations and developing a data marketplace. Once you’ve demonstrated your ability to accomplish what you’re accountable for and prove to be a cultural fit with the team, we plan to build a team around you to support the demands of building out the synthetic population and data marketplace. You will have the opportunity to grow with the company as an individual contributor or manager based on what you gravitate towards. Given we are an early stage startup, you can also expect that your responsibilities will grow as we gain traction with customers.

Why are synthetic populations important?

Our synthetic population serves as the data product in our platform stack that models and solutions are built on top of. The synthetic population enables users across organizations to test interventions to improve outcomes for the health, economic, and collective well-being of populations. Having a synthetic population that becomes more and more realistic over time is critical to building trust in the models and solutions built with our platform.

Responsibilities

  • Engage with customer success, product, and engineering teams to understand project specific synthetic population requirements.
  • Enhance granularity of synthetic populations.
  • Enhance background sociological models of the synthetic population.
  • Collect and process data on workplaces, schools, neighborhoods, households, social networks, and information networks from public and private sources.
  • Develop and manage the process for building synthetic populations for countries around the world.
  • Develop software packages to produce and analyze synthetic populations for use in simulations.
  • Work with external users to integrate their data with our synthetic population.
  • Create high quality visualizations for marketing and productizing synthetic populations.
  • Deliver synthetic populations as complete products with comprehensive documentation.
  • Work with external vendors and marketplaces to expand the ecosystem of data providers contributing to the synthetic population.
  • Key metrics you will influence include:
    • Synthetic population subscription sales
    • Number of third party data providers in the data marketplace
    • Decrease time for new users to integrate their data with the synthetic population
    • Increase number of new models created
    • Increase the number of solutions generated

Qualifications

  • Curious about how to build an ecosystem around a synthetic population that serves as a source of truth for data used in simulations.
  • Empathy for users and decision makers using the synthetic population in their work.
  • Motivated to build the standard for synthetic populations globally to improve decision making across social, health, economic, and environmental policies.
  • Get energized by advancing data science into more commercial applications.
  • Past successes building data products and/or data marketplaces.
  • Demonstrated advanced understanding of relational databases.
  • Excel in a work environment where you have to be execution oriented while contributing to the strategic thinking of the company.
  • Experience working with simulation, data science, or machine learning products.
  • Experience working with geospatial data.
  • Experience delivering technical training to users via in-person and asynchronous formats.
  • A startup mentality and the ability to flex across needs of an evolving team in a fast-paced environment.

Start Date: ASAP

Email jobs@epistemix.com with your resume to apply.