Senior Data Scientist - Aotearoa New Zealand

About Starboard Maritime Intelligence

Starboard is web-based geospatial software that provides teams with a real-time view of global maritime activity and powerful tools for analysis and collaboration. Starboard helps nations tackle complex maritime challenges, ranging from risk-assessing arriving vessels to detecting illegal fishing and helping prevent biosecurity outbreaks.

We are a remote organisation with team members dispersed throughout Aotearoa and Australia. We are collaborative and supportive by nature and necessity—software and science are both difficult. Combining the two successfully requires teamwork, empathy and a willingness to listen and understand other people’s point of view.

We believe that to build a great company and tackle complex problems, we need a broad range of skills, perspectives and backgrounds. We invest in our team and support one another.

We have recently raised capital, are growing our recurring revenue, and are hiring engineers and an international sales team in addition to this role.

Who we’re looking for

Our data scientists play a key role helping to design, develop and implement data science related features into the platform. You’ll be working within our small and dedicated product team — moving fast and working independently.

To enjoy and excel in this role we’re looking for:

• An experienced data scientist with at least five years working as a data scientist/machine learning engineer;
• Someone who is deeply curious about the data they are working with, is not fazed by digging through terabytes of data, and is just as happy delivering a model that uses basic heuristics as they are building a machine learning model;
• Enthusiasm for owning the entire model development cycle. This involves taking the model from concept to production, including data ETL, model development and testing, documenting, integrating with the backend systems, and ongoing monitoring and testing of results when in production;
• Demonstrated ability to communicate complex ideas both verbally and by other means (presentations, proposals, bug reports, forum discussions, etc);
• Excellent programming skills and knowledge of common python data science and machine learning tools such as Numpy, Scipy, Pandas, and Scikit-Learn

Also nice to have but not required (we will upskill the right person!):

• Experience with geospatial and time series data;
• Experience developing data processing pipelines;
• Familiarity with software engineering tools and processes such as git (or other version control), docker, and testing; and

Primarily, we want someone who produces great work and gets the job done. If you think you’d be a great fit for the role but don’t have the exact experience set out above, please still get in touch and apply — we’d love to hear from you!

How we build software and how data scientists fit in

We work backwards from the customer problem to the technology. Our roadmap comes from team ideas, user research, market research, and requirements to make our software reliable, fast, and scale with user growth. It contains a mixture of large unique and valuable features, and tiny improvements. We believe great software is made of a thousand, small good experiences.

We deliver software with highly collaborative cross functional product teams. These teams include front and back end engineers, data scientists and product designers. Our data scientists are “full stack”, owning the process from concept to production. This process includes:

• working closely with product designers to identify where data science, machine learning, or analytics can and should be applied,
• defining the requirements for any solution,
• designing and testing a solution to the problem that meets the requirements,
• working with engineering to implement the solution in well written and documented python or golang code,
• constantly evaluating the performance of the solution and implementing any required fixes or improvements,
• working with sales and marketing when required to produce marketing collateral related to the implemented solution.

As a company and product team we set and measure annual and quarterly goals. We don’t break down tasks into small units, we don’t plan two week sprints, and we don’t measure velocity. We give our teams and team members space and autonomy to come up with efficient ways to solve problems and deliver great software.

How to apply

To apply for this role, please head to our listing on Seek.

Please note – there is no closing date for this job posting. We will be reviewing applications as they come in, so it is recommended you submit your application sooner rather than later. However, we will keep looking until we find the right candidate.

If you have any questions regarding this position, please email work@starboard.nz.