Staff Data Scientist

Why project44?

project44 optimizes the movement of products globally, delivering better resiliency, sustainability, and value for our customers. As the supply chain connective tissue, we operate the most trusted end-to-end visibility platform that tracks more than 1 billion shipments annually for the world’s leading brands. The undisputed leader in the market, project44 was named the Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant, #1 in FreightWaves’ Freight Tech 25, and the Customer’s Choice in Gartner Peer Insights’ Voice of the Customer report. project44 is headquartered in Chicago with a diverse and fast-growing, global workforce.

Our data scientists have access to the data that tells the story of some of the supply chain disruptions that have been making the news over the last few years (COVID-19, Suez Canal blockage, increases in extreme weather, etc.). We can see that in our data and provide real-time solutions for our customers.

What Data Scientists Do Here

At the end of the day, project44 is a data company. Project44 has grown to a $1B+ valuation by making supply chain and logistics datasets available and visible to the people who need them. The next step is to extract insights from that data – and that’s where we come in. While some companies have data scientists whose primary focus is on making the organization smarter, our focus is on providing insights to our customers. We use all sorts of data (geospatial, time-series, etc…) to build models that predict the route that a shipment might take, estimate the time a truck/train/ship might arrive at its destination, and ultimately model the behavior of every “link” in the global supply “chain”. Our Data Scientists collaborate with engineers, product owners, and most importantly one another to contribute insights and data science best practices to all parts of the business.

Typical day-to-day tasks for a Staff Data Scientist might include:

1. Perform an analysis to make a recommendation to other team members as to whether data science methods can be used to solve a given problem
2. Research and evaluate new analytical methodologies, approaches, and solutions
3. Build, test, and deploy supervised or unsupervised learning models
4. Collaborate with teams to analyze behavior of global transportation networks & supply chains
5. Write queries (SQL) to grab the right set of data to solve their problem
6. Build tools to enable other data scientists to scale their knowledge and increase impact
7. Interpret and communicate analytic results to analytical and non-analytical business partners and executive decision makers
8. Participate in code reviews and model reviews of their teammates
9. Collaborate with ML Ops Engineers to deploy new models to production software
10. Mentor less-experienced team members

What We Are Looking For

Ability to Write Sophisticated Data Analysis & Machine Learning Code in Python!

Some ways the previous successful candidates have demonstrated this are:

1. Contributing to influential Open Source Projects like sklearn, LightGBM, XGBoost, Tidyverse, Tensorflow, pytorch, pandas, etc.
2. Describing a data science project they developed within a resume or cover letter
3. Making a high quality data science project available in a public forum like GitHub or Kaggle
4. Publishing work in Data Science related journals or conferences such as ICML, NIPS, JML, KDD, ODSC, and INFORMS
5. In-office Commitment: Employees are expected to contribute to our collaborative culture by working in the office two days weekly

Capacity for a High Degree of Autonomy and Out-of-the-Box Thinking!

Our data scientists are at the cutting edge of logistics and supply chain, working on problems that have never been solved before. The more you’re willing to dive into a problem and own it – the better!

Some ways the previous successful candidates have demonstrated this are:

1. Taking a real-world problem without a nice pre-existing dataset and solved it on their own as a hobby or side project
2. Leading a project at a past job, from ideation to implementation
3. Contributing a new feature to an open source project

Nice To Have

1. 7+ years professional experience working in an analytics or DS focused role
2. Experience with the transportation and/or freight logistics industry
3. Experience writing production code in one or more of: C++, C, Java, Python, Scala, or Spark
4. Experience working with IoT systems, ranging from DIY home projects to industrial IoT deployments
5. Experience working and collaborating in JupyterLab
6. Have made substantive contributions to open source projects in the areas of data science or machine learning
7. Experience developing software projects with large teams using technologies like; git, github, jira etc.
8. Master's degree or PhD in a quantitative or relevant field

Diversity & Inclusion

We're designing the future of how the world moves and is connected through trade and global supply chains. We can only deliver a truly world-class product and experience if our teams are as diverse and unique communities we are building for. So it's up to us to create a company where anyone can bring their authentic self to work every day. We're constantly working to improve, and we accept our responsibility to elevate the voices left in the margins. It's on every one of us.

Our focus on inclusion manifests in the way we hire, the customers we serve, and the regions we prioritize. We're building a company that every one of us at project44 is proud to work for: a company that celebrates you for being you.

We pride ourselves on celebrating everyone — project44 is an equal opportunity employer actively working on creating a diverse and inclusive work environment where underrepresented groups can thrive. If you share our values and our passion for helping the way the world moves, we’d love to review your application!

For any needed accommodations during the hiring process, please email Even if you don’t meet 100% of the above qualifications, you should still seriously consider applying. Studies show that you can still be considered for a role if you meet just 50% of the role’s requirements.

About Project44

Since 2014, project44 has been transforming the way one of the largest, most important global industries does business. As transportation and logistics continues to evolve and customer expectations around delivery become more demanding, industry technology must rise to the occasion. In just a few short years, we’ve created a digital infrastructure that eliminates the inefficiencies caused by dated technology and manual processes. Our Advanced Visibility Platform is used by the world’s leading brands to track shipments, collaborate with supply chain partners, drive operational efficiencies, and create outstanding customer experiences.