Senior Data Scientist

The Position

Do you dream about creating a more sustainable future? At Uplight, we are motivating energy users and providers to accelerate the clean energy ecosystem. Working with over 90 of the world’s leading electric and gas utilities, Uplight provides an end-to-end customer energy experience. Uplight delivers personalized experiences that customers have now come to expect–improving satisfaction, increasing revenue, reducing the cost to serve, and contributing to carbon reduction goals. We are B Corp certified, enabling us to put our values into action by not only making decisions for the benefit of our shareholders, but also for our customers, environment, employees, and community.

We are seeking a Senior Data Scientist to join our team and help us achieve our ambitious goals for our business and the planet.

What you get to do:

• The Forecasting team is looking for an experienced Senior Data Scientist to develop and maintain Uplights measurement and verification (M&V) and forecasting platform. We have a platform that can support forecasting and M&V for about a million devices.
• You will work with the team of data engineers and software engineers to launch new forecasting and M&V services and to optimize existing ones. You should lead the data science efforts to gain insight and develop/improve the core algorithms for M&V and various types of time-series forecasts. You should also possess good programming skills to navigate our codebase and work with our distributed infrastructure; we expect our data scientists to write production code with some help from software engineers.

What you will contribute:

• Design, implement, and maintain the algorithms for M&V and forecasting.
• Perform ad-hoc analysis on Uplight’s data to gain insights and guide decisions.
• Improve scalability of forecasting and M&V jobs by optimizing code.
• Work with other data/software/SRE engineers to troubleshoot production problems and respond to customer queries.
• Educate the team members of the data science work, including the algorithms for M&V and time-series forecasting.
• Mentor junior data scientists and software engineers.
• Gather and analyze requirements and convert functional requirements into concrete technical tasks and be able to provide consistent and reasonable effort estimates on an ongoing basis.
• Work effectively with the engineering teams distributed globally to understand project requirements, identify opportunities for collaboration, and articulate project delivery risks in advance.
• Communicate effectively across business to team leads, subject matter experts, leadership, clients and other stakeholders.
• Most of our codebase is in Python, and various services run on Kubernetes clusters. We use MySQL and HBase as storage, most often, and Spark (specifically pyspark) is used to support large forecasting and M&V jobs. For monitoring, we often use Prometheus. We follow a 2-week Scrum process, and the code is released to clients every 2-3 months.

What you bring to Uplight:

• Ability to learn a problem domain quickly and think critically. Prior experience in the energy industry, especially in electricity and demand response, is preferred.
• Possess good statistical intuition and solid understanding in various machine/statistical learning techniques for time series forecasting, e.g. ARIMA, regression-based, and deep-learning models. Hands-on experience in building forecasting models is required.
• Experience in Python data science stack, e.g. numpy, scipy, pandas, and scikit-learn.
• Experience in some parallelization framework (pyspark or Dask) is required.
• Experience with RDS and SQL is required. Experience with NoSQL databases is a plus.
• Excellent communication skills, ability to explain complex technical topics to both technical and non-technical audiences highlighting pros, cons, estimated timelines and risks associated for prioritization, decision making and risk mitigation.
• Ability to cope with and thrive in a fast paced, dynamic work environment with evolving project requirements.
• Good programming skills and the ability to navigate a distributed infrastructure are required.

Bonus points:

• Experience in working with production codebase
• Experience working in an agile team
• Experience using containerization (e.g. Docker) and Kubernetes
• Don’t meet every single requirement? Studies have shown that women, marginalized genders and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single qualification. At Uplight we are dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive and authentic workplace, so if you’re excited about this role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyways. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.

What makes working at Uplight amazing:

We are:

• Proud to be over 500+ purpose-driven individuals helping to create a more sustainable planet.
• Committed to the environment, our employees, and our communities.
• Focused on providing cross-functional work, collaboration, and development.