Come and work with us!

Stan is an open-source, state-of-the-art probabilistic programming language with a high-performance Bayesian inference engine written in C++. Stan had been successfully applied to modeling problems with hundreds of thousands of parameters in fields as diverse as econometrics, sports analytics, physics, pharmacometrics, recommender systems, political science, and many more. Research using Stan has been featured in the New York Times, Slate, and other media outlets as well as in leading scientific journals in a range of disciplines. The Stan user community is in the tens of thousands.

The Stan community is growing faster than we expected and we have a large backlog of features that we would like to add to the language. If you would like to join a small team of statisticians, computer scientists, and other researchers who are working on some of the most interesting problems in computational statistics today, we encourage you to apply.

Stan programmers

We are looking for software engineers to work in at least one of the following areas:
• C++ programming
• Scripting languages and Stan interfaces
• Web development
• Parallel, distributed, and high-performance computing
We have a fun, intense, non-hierarchical collaborative working environment. And everything is open-source, which will maximize the impact of your contributions. Come work on a project which makes a difference for thousands of academic and industrial researchers around the world.

Stan business developer/grants manager

Our larger vision is for breadth (there is a wide range of application areas where Stan can make a difference), depth (improving the algorithms and the language to be able to fit more complicated models), and scalability (“big data”).

We are currently involved in research and development in all these areas, and we need a manager to:
• Organize the work, matching projects to people, integrating new hires.
• Raise funds, including grant applications, contacts with foundations and businesses and consulting opportunities, etc.
• Both of these involve people skills, technical understanding, and an interest, ultimately, in solving real world problems. Hence the project manager should have a technical background and be interested in applications of statistics to the wider world.

Postdocs

In addition we have new and ongoing projects involving Bayesian modeling and Stan research and development in applications, including:

• Causal inference using Gaussian processes and Bart
• Survey weighting and regression modeling
• Mixture models for gene splicing

Key skills for any postdoc are statistical modeling, computing, and communication. Writing papers, also developing methods that work on real problems.

Applying

If you are interested in any of these, just email me telling me which position(s) interest you and why. Include a C.V. and anything else that might be relevant (such as papers you’ve written or links to code you’ve written), and have three letters of recommendation sent to me (or give the names of three people who could provide recommendations if asked).

5 thoughts on “Come and work with us!

  1. In case this helps: If I were outside academia thinking of applying for these jobs, I think the request for letters of recommendation might deter me: They’re asking for a lot of work from the writers, and they aren’t that common outside academia (so it’s work that people would be surprised by).

    Talking with people’s references later in the process is the usual way to get this information in industry, I think.

    Not sure if this is a problem for you or not, but thought I’d mention it.

    • I think all of us working on Stan at Columbia do quite a bit of work from home, but it’s definitely important to be able to meet in person. In other words, I don’t think these jobs could be done 100% remotely, but they’re not standard office jobs and there’s plenty of flexibility regarding working remotely when necessary.

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