Data Scientist

About Plover Parametrics

Plover is a Y Combinator backed SaaS company focused on delivering financial resiliency to people and businesses impacted by climate change. We are accomplishing this goal by building the end-to-end software platform for event-driven insurance. We believe that software has a critical role to play in increasing access to insurance. Software is the only tool that can accelerate the speed and lower the cost with which innovations like parametric insurance products can be designed and sold at scale. Our software makes it easier for insurance carriers and brokers to bring parametric enhancements and new products to market faster and cheaper – utilizing IoT, satellite, financial, public filing and weather data to bring financial resilience to the widest possible population of people and businesses. After raising $5.3M of funding in May 2022, we opened an office in New York and are hiring so we can power parametric insurance products at the world's largest insurance companies.

Role Description

The Data Scientist will assist the CDO (Chief Data Officer) and senior management in developing new risk models for novel insurance products. Tasks include:

• Data discovery, processing, and analysis across a wide range of sources and data types to evaluate and support risk models, pricing models, and real-time event monitoring
• Building and refining models to assess the probability of loss-correlated insurable events in contexts ranging from natural disasters to utility outages;
• Presenting information internally and externally using data visualization techniques.

The outputs of this role will be used to create novel insurance products for insurance companies and brokers. The work product this role will produce is not targeted at internal product and process optimization, but at generating external business results.

We expect the individual in this role will take on management responsibilities as both they and the company develop.

Experience & Qualifications

Able to:

• Identify valuable data sources and automate collection processes;
• Undertake preprocessing of structured and unstructured data;
• Build, evaluate, and apply predictive models;
• Conduct research on modeling approaches and machine learning methods;
• Identify new and innovative ideas and apply new methods from academic and industry research in novel contexts
• Present information using data visualization techniques;
• Propose solutions and strategies to address business challenges and ensure the insurance products we are enabling meet our clients’ needs;
• Collaborate with engineering and business development teams;
• Experience in insurance welcome but not required; and
• Fluent in English.

Project Examples

• Geospatial Data: Apply machine learning and modeling techniques to satellite imagery to remotely evaluate the health of forest and wetland ecosystems and afforestation projects;
• Financial / Public Filing: Gather and use corporate financial data, public filings, and stock/options price data to model the risk of insurable loss events for publicly-traded companies; and
• Weather / Climate: Combine satellite radar altimetry data with in-situ weather and climate data to improve the accuracy of models used to insure offshore wind, aquaculture, and other climate-impacted coastal industries.

Skills/Personality

• Able to consume, structure and synthesize large volumes of information quickly and competently;
• Able to scope a project, create likely time estimates to completion, and communicate those expectations effectively;
• Able to work autonomously and pragmatically to make appropriate technical decisions;
• A healthy sense of curiosity about the world, insurance business, and the startup ecosystem; and
• Strong motivation by and support of the Plover mission of enabling climate resiliency.

Why Join Plover?

• Competitive salary, equity and benefits packages;
• Hybrid/flexible remote -- we're in the office a few days a week;
• Opportunity to work alongside and learn from top data scientists and software engineers;
• Get a ringside view into the workflows and process of company building at a seed-stage, Y Combinator-backed startup;
• Learn an enormous amount about an exciting and emerging new field.

Diversity

• Prioritizing diversity, multiculturalism, and inclusion is hugely important to us. Plover welcomes and encourages applicants from diverse backgrounds and abilities to apply.