Job Description Summary

Organization's Summary Statement:
The A. James Clark School of Engineering at the University of Maryland serves as the catalyst for high-quality research, innovation, and learning, delivering on a promise that all graduates will leave ready to impact the Grand Challenges (e.g., energy, environment, security, and human health) of the 21st century. The Clark School is dedicated to leading and transforming the engineering discipline and profession, to accelerating entrepreneurship, and to transforming research and learning activities into new innovations that benefit millions.

The Center for Advanced Transportation Technology (CATT) Laboratory is the industry leader for transportation information analysis, visualization, and user interface design. We provide cutting-edge analytics products and an integrated suite of situational awareness tools for transportation practitioners. These products and services are rapidly changing the way governments operate and make decisions. You can learn more about our products at https://ritis.org/.

We receive hundreds of gigabytes of transportation data daily, making our petabytes of archived data likely the largest collection of traffic data in the world. Our clients use our software to monitor real-time operations and analyze historical data to generate valuable insights. Our work saves taxpayers money, improves the environment, and saves lives!

We’re as passionate about transportation as we are about building great software. We care about building usable, stable, and secure software to analyze massive amounts of data. We use cutting-edge tech to build and maintain our software. We have a mature development process and use industry best practices to build the best software possible. Our team is composed of application developers, analysts, UX designers, data scientists, IT, quality assurance specialists, and customer support operating in an Agile environment.

Our office is in College Park near the University of Maryland, easily accessible by DC Metro, MARC train, bus, car, and bike. Local employees are welcome to work in our office, or other locations, with a flexible schedule around our core hours. We also have many employees who are fully remote and work from different states. UMD requires all employees to live in the US, and we periodically bring remote employees to work with colleagues on-site.

We believe varied perspectives build better products, are proud to have a diverse team, and encourage people of all backgrounds to apply.

When you join our team, you will work to define, document, and test a wide variety of transportation data analytics and operations applications. You will learn new skills and stay current with industry best practices and emerging technologies.

Data Science Role Overview
The CATT Lab is searching for a talented senior-level transportation data scientist that can provide analytics support to help solve transportation, safety and security problems. The data scientist will lead CATT Lab’s reporting, analysis, modeling and visualization needs. This candidate should be an expert in extracting and transforming data to deliver analytical solutions, methodologies, models and dashboards.

Essential duties and responsibilities:

Data Science:
Serve as expert on RITIS suite data, methodologies, and approaches
Design and deploy comprehensive validation strategies for analytical tools
Lead efforts to integrate predictive analytics into CATT Lab products, with emphasis on machine learning techniques
Identify opportunities to leverage production ready code when developing proof-of-concept exploratory analysis
Provide oversight and guidance on technical approaches to experiment design, predictive modeling, and other statistical techniques
Discover and provide insights into utilizing new data sets such as location-based services (LBS) into CATT Lab products
Handle high visibility, quick turnaround processing and analysis tasks for senior leadership

Leadership and Team Management:
Manage day-to-day operations of transportation data science team consisting of junior and mid level data scientists
Lead cross-team communications with data scientists, UX designers, database administrators, back-end developers and front-end developers
Coordinate and collaborate with UX designers to ensure technical methodologies align with interface designs that support effective data analysis and decision making
Serve as Principal Investigator and fully manage client-based research projects
Meet independently with clients to discuss inquiries and help them interpret data results
Demonstrate strong written and verbal communication skills with the ability to communicate approach and results to technical and non-technical audiences

Outreach and Business Opportunity Identification:
Identify and lead potential funding opportunities developing core ideas, defining requirements and developing estimates
Lead composition of research reports, journal articles, and other technical documents
Represent CATT Lab at professional conferences and workshops
Assist in growing the CATT Lab by recruiting new students and employees

Minimum qualifications:

Doctoral degree in Data Science, Transportation, Engineering, Computer Science or a relevant field.
4+ years of relevant professional experience with Python, R, SQL and/or Java
4+ years of experience implementing prediction and machine learning models
4+ years of experience with wrangling data and writing preprocessing scripts
4+ years of experience with a lead technical role, managing and mentoring junior data scientists
1+ years of experience with Regional Integrated Transportation Information System (RITIS), Probe Data Analytics (PDA) and Trip Analytics
Experience analyzing transportation data sets such as trajectory and probe data and corresponding transportation system performance measures
Strong background in transportation data collection methods and technologies
Strong communication skills; ability to present technical plans to a non-technical audience efficiently.
Experience with Git, Jira, Confluence, and Bitbucket


Preferences:
9+ years of relevant professional experience with Python, R, SQL and/or Java
Understanding of public agency perspectives on safety, mobility, and sustainability
Familiar with transportation reference manuals such as the HCM, MUTCD, AASHTO Green Book, and HSM
Power user or expert with Regional Integrated Transportation Information System (RITIS), Probe Data Analytics (PDA) and Trip Analytics
Experience with developing scalable prediction and machine learning models for real-time and historical analysis in software applications
Experience conducting validation of methodologies and approaches
Experience working with big data requiring Spark, Hadoop or other related systems



Physical Demands: Sedentary work performed in an office environment. Regularly required to communicate and exchange information and to use technology/devices. Position can be 100% remote


Licenses/ Certifications: NA

Additional Job Details

Financial Disclosure Required

No

Department

ENGR-Civil-Center for Advanced Transportation Technology

Worker Sub-Type

Faculty Regular

Salary Range

$160,000-177,968.79

Background Checks

Offers of employment are contingent on completion of a background check. Information reported by the background check will not automatically disqualify anyone from employment. Before any adverse decision, the finalist will have an opportunity to provide information to the University regarding disclosable background check information. The University reserves the right to rescind the offer of employment or otherwise decline or terminate employment if the information reported by the background check is deemed incompatible with the position, regardless of when the background check is completed.

Employment Eligibility

The successful candidate must complete employment eligibility verification (on Form I-9) by presenting documents that establish identity and work authorization within the timeframe required by federal immigration law, and where applicable, to demonstrate renewed employment authorization. Failure to complete employment eligibility verification or reverification within the timeframe set forth by law may result in suspension or termination of employment.

EEO Statement

The University of Maryland, College Park is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive equal consideration for employment. Please read the University’s Equal Employment Opportunity Statement of Policy.

Title IX Non-Discrimination Notice

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