Postdoctorate Scientist jobs in Akron, OH

The Company

1848 Ventures meets business owners where they are; collaborating to develop digital solutions that target the broad range of uncertainties they face every day.

Westfield, a leading provider of commercial insurance, established 1848 Ventures in 2018 to lead the company’s efforts to expand beyond conventional insurance by understanding and addressing the broader risks that customers face. We deliver tangible customer growth and financial results by developing and monetizing a portfolio of customer-centered innovations, which may or may not involve insurance, but are consistent with Westfield’s brand and reinforce our right to win in various markets.

Based in Northeast Ohio (near Cleveland,) 1848 Ventures offers team members the opportunity to apply their creative talents and entrepreneurial drive to a wide range of portfolio concepts while taking advantage of the stability and total rewards that are made possible by the backing of a strong, leading company.

Our cultural emphasis on values like work-life balance, recognition, learning and career development are all a reflection of our belief – true innovation and entrepreneurship require the right balance of support, freedom and growth opportunities.

We’re looking for experienced, results-driven critical thinkers with a sense of urgency from a diverse array of personal and professional backgrounds to join 1848 Ventures’ highly collaborative team.

The Opportunity

Data Scientists often find themselves saddled with the digital exhaust organization's transactional systems generate without regard to the information (or lack thereof) it possesses. At 1848 Ventures, data scientists are uniquely embedded into the innovation process of developing digital products. From defining information-rich digital representations of the phenomena and entities of interest, to purposefully designing the model-driven solutions from the ground up. 

1848 Ventures is structured so that we are pursuing many concurrent innovation efforts at any given time. Each of these efforts may be at a different stage in its evolution, something we call the 'innovation funnel'. These stages are designed to drive a deeper understanding of the proposed solution's desirability, feasibility, and viability. For the data science team, this evolution manifests itself as increasing levels of fidelity in collaborating on pain point understanding, digital representation design, data acquisition, prototype development (from data pipeline to model), and exploring the value of data as a component of total net value created. 

Responsibilities:

• Collaborate with the concept development team to discover and understand common pain points small businesses face and ideate potential model driven solutions 
• Identify the digital signals required to bring the solution to life 
• Design and execute a strategy to acquire the data (purchase, partner, generate, collect) 
• Develop solution prototype in partnership with the small businesses it targets 
• Iterate prototype, increasing the fidelity of our learnings towards the solutions desirability, feasibility, and viability 
• Assess the potential risks and consequences associated with the model and solution 
• Help determine real-world value and utility of the potential solutions 

Qualifications:

• The ability to dive deep and solve new complex problems but the discernment to know when, and how deep to dive (progress over perfection; value driven)  
• Exposure to or an appreciation of human-centered design and innovation philosophy 
• High levels of competence with a general-purpose programming language such as Python  
• Commercial experience applying data and machine learning to drive innovation and/ or generate business value 
• Proficient with a wide variety of machine learning and data munging libraries and tools 
• Prior experience working with data engineers, software engineers, and dev ops teams to set up appropriate technical resources to perform Data Science work and translating prototypes to production 
• Familiarity with at least one cloud-based platform (Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, or Microsoft Azure) 
• Ability to extract value from data in a variety of formats, structured and unstructured, residing in a variety of data systems (relational databases, object storage, etc.) 

We are an equal opportunity employer / minority / female / disability / protected veteran.

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