Category: Jobs in OR

Since Operations Research is a very practical field, it is not surprising that companies often spin out of universities led by OR professors.  SmartOps was started by my colleague Sridhar Tayur, LogicTools was founded by MIT Professor David Simchi-Levi, former INFORMS President Don Kleinmuntz founded Strata Decision Technologies, and on and on.  Entrepreneurship and Operations Research mix very well.

One new aspect (at least new to me!) is getting National Science Foundation support to create these firms.  Tuomas Sandholm of Carnegie Mellon has received such a grant and is creating a firm Optimized Markets.  He is looking for people to join this startup.  At least for some of the jobs, the structure of the position is unusual:  an initial year is spent as a postdoc at CMU, followed (if everything works out) with a position at Optimized Markets.  Some job announcements follow.

These look like interesting jobs for the right type of person.

 

ENTREPRENEURIAL R&D POSITION AT CARNEGIE MELLLON UNIVERSITY AND OPTIMIZED MARKETS, INC.

The US administration is appropriately interested in facilitating the transfer of university-generated technologies into the commercial world.  The National Science Foundation has a new selective program for facilitating this.  Prof. Sandholm received a grant from that program to commercialize some of the technology and know-how being developed in his Electronic Marketplaces laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University.  He founded a startup company, Optimized Markets, Inc., for the commercialization.

The position is first for a year as a Research Associate or Postdoctoral Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University.  After that, conditional on good progress, the person will transition into a position of significance at Optimized Markets, Inc.

The company has ambitious plans in many application areas in the intersection of electronic marketplaces and integer programming.  The particular product that the person will be working on in the first couple of years is in advertising campaign sales and scheduling for TV, Internet display, video, mobile, and cross-media advertising.

This is a truly exceptional opportunity for someone who wants to change the world with technology.

The position is open immediately.

Requirements:

– Strong knowledge of integer programming
– Strong skills and desire to build significant production-quality optimization software that is fast in practice
– PhD in operations research, computer science, or equivalent field
– Strong command of C++
– Desire and ability to work hard in a fast-moving environment
– Desire to change the world with technology

Desired additional qualities (not required):

– Experience in developing commercial software
– Command of Ruby on Rails and Java
– Experience in Software-as-a-Service/cloud
– Good written and oral communication skills
– Ability to work independently and as part of a team

The position offers the following:

– Opportunity to learn from, and work with, the world’s leading experts in integer programming and market design
– Opportunity to work on highly novel approaches to integer programming and tree search
– Opportunity to learn from a serial entrepreneur and a mentor network how to become a successful entrepreneur
– Opportunity to work on exciting new real-world problems
– Opportunity to have your work fielded and change the world
– Opportunity to publish
– Salary plus stock options in a promising startup
– Opportunity to join an exciting new startup in a position of significance

Candidates should email a letter of application, CV, and a list of references to:
Tuomas Sandholm
Professor
Computer Science Department
Carnegie Mellon University
sandholm AT cs DOT cmu DOT edu
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sandholm/

——————-

OPTIMIZATION SOFTWARE ENGINEER POSITION AT OPTIMIZED MARKETS, INC. / CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY

The US administration is appropriately interested in facilitating the transfer of university-generated technologies into the commercial world.  The National Science Foundation has a new selective program for facilitating this.  Prof. Sandholm received a grant from that program to commercialize some of the technology and know-how being developed in his Electronic Marketplaces laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University.  He founded a startup company, Optimized Markets, Inc., for the commercialization. The company has ambitious plans in many application areas in the intersection of electronic marketplaces and integer programming.

The first product for the Optimization Software Engineer between Optimized Markets, Inc. and Carnegie Mellon University to work on is in advertising campaign sales and scheduling for TV, Internet display, video, mobile, and cross-media advertising.

This is a truly exceptional opportunity for someone who wants to change the world with technology.

The position is open immediately.

Requirements:

– Strong skills and desire to build significant production-quality optimization software that is fast in practice
– Strong command of C++
– BS or MS in computer science, operations research, or equivalent field
– Desire and ability to work hard in a fast-moving environment
– Desire to change the world with technology

Desired additional qualities:

– Strong knowledge of integer programming / tree search
– Experience in developing commercial software
– Command of Ruby on Rails and Java
– Experience in Software-as-a-Service/cloud
– Good written and oral communication skills
– Ability to work independently and as part of a team

The position offers the following:

– Opportunity to learn from, and work with, the world’s leading experts in integer programming and market design
– Opportunity to work on highly novel approaches to integer programming and tree search
– Opportunity to learn from a serial entrepreneur and a mentor network how to become a successful entrepreneur
– Opportunity to work on exciting new real-world problems
– Opportunity to have your work fielded and change the world
– Opportunity to publish
– Salary plus stock options in a promising startup
– Opportunity to join an exciting new startup in a position of significance

Candidates should email a letter of application, CV, and a list of references to:
Tuomas Sandholm
Professor
Computer Science Department
Carnegie Mellon University
sandholm AT cs DOT cmu DOT edu
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sandholm/

I teach (and, now, administrate) in the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University.  Unlike most engineering-oriented universities, CMU does not have an Industrial (or Systems) Engineering department, so operations research people are scattered throughout the university.  The Tepper contingent is a big one (senior faculty include Balas, Cornuejols, and Hooker) and is augmented by others in the school with operations research interests (people like Sridhar Tayur who is in our operations management group).  But there are lots of OR people elsewhere, including Chemical Engineering (Ignacio Grossman, for instance), Mathematics (Alan Frieze), and Computer Science (Tuomas Sandholm).

The Heinz College of Public Policy and Information Systems has a large contingent of operations researchers, including Al Blumstein, one of the founding researchers in our field.  And the Heinz College is hiring in our area!  Here is the announcement:

Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College  is currently expanding its program targeted at analysis, design, and eventual implementation of Urban Systems and is seeking to recruit tenure-track faculty to be key participants in those developments. Heinz College (www.heinz.cmu.edu) consists of a School of Public Policy and Management and a School of Information Systems and Management.

We are seeking individuals from a diversity of related disciplines, including economics, transportation, operations research and the management sciences, statistics, and systems engineering with specific attention to civil engineering.

Our interests in Urban Systems include transportation systems, public-safety systems, and the built environment. While these problem domains are diverse, to be addressed effectively an interdisciplinary perspective is required. We are thus seeking candidates who are open to collaborating with researchers from other disciplines. We have developed relationships with a number of cities, including Pittsburgh and New York, as sources of data, experimental opportunities for improved system designs, and expertise in the realm of problems associated with their operating systems.

All candidates should have a PhD (or should demonstrate that one will be achieved shortly) in relation to one of the identified disciplines and have demonstrated research competence. Interested applicants are asked to send their application to the Urban Systems Search Committee at urban-sys-heinz-college@andrew.cmu.edu. An application should include a cover letter indicating their particular interests and their sense of fit with the Heinz College, a CV, copies of any published papers, and three sources of reference letters.

We will be conducting interviews at the October INFORMS meeting in Phoenix. For consideration at these meetings, applications should be submitted at least one month in advance.

If this sounds like you, please consider applying.  I look forward to having even more operations research on this campus!

I don’t normally do job postings on this blog:  there is OR/MS Today and INFORMS Job Placement Service and so on for that, but sometimes a job catches my eye.  A company is looking for a Masters level OR specialist to provide analysis for them.  They run a nice sized network:  hundreds of sources and transfer points with presumably thousands of trucks linking them.  It is clear there are lots of interesting things you can do with the network.

It is a little unusual since it is a waste product network, involving transporting waste to landfills, energy plants, recycling plants and so on.  This is one industry that strikes me as being pretty resistant to the peaks and valleys of the overall economy (as opposed to, say, financial portfolio optimization).

Here is part of the description:

Waste Management, Inc. is the leading provider of comprehensive waste and environmental services in North America. The company serves nearly 20 million municipal, commercial, industrial, and residential customers through a network of 367 collection operations, 355 transfer stations, 273 active landfill disposal sites, 16 waste-to-energy plants, 134 recycling plants, and 111 beneficial-use landfill gas projects.

Waste Management currently has a opportunity for a Operations Research Specialist at our downtown Houston, TX, headquarters.

Job Summary

Formulate and apply mathematical modeling and other optimizing methods to develop and interpret information that assists the entire Waste Management organization with decision-making, policy formulation, or other managerial functions. Additionally the Operations Research Specialist frequently concentrates on collecting and analyzing data and developing decision support software. The Operations Research Specialist will develop and supply analytic support for optimal time, costing, pricing, or logistics networks for evaluation and/or implementation.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities include the following:

To perform this job successfully, an individual must be able to perform the essential duties satisfactorily.  Other minor duties may be assigned.

· Formulate mathematical models (linear and non-linear) of problems, relating constants and variables, restrictions, alternatives, conflicting objectives, and their numerical parameters.

· Conduct simulation (discrete event) studies of existing and proposed systems, including definition of data requirements; capture and validation of information, model formulation, design experimentation, and application of appropriate statistical analysis.

…

The skills needed are a mix of simulation and optimization skills:

Demonstrated ability to apply operations research techniques including decision analysis, optimization, simulation and statistical and stochastic modeling.

· Significant experience utilizing mathematical programming software packages such as IBM ILOG CPLEX, LINDO, or Xpress.

· Demonstrated ability to develop simulation models and conduct studies utilizing commercial simulation software such as Arena, AutoMOD, Witness, etc.

· Strong problem solving and analysis skills: ability to identify root causes of problems, create effective practical solution approaches, implement solutions under the tactical demands of business operations.

· Programming experience, preferably in C or C#.

· Committed and highly motivated team player with strong communication skills.

· Demonstrated work and familiarity with data mining and visualization tools.

· Experience with working as part of an integrated solutions development team to provide value to systems engineering and development for specific decision support application

If you are interested in this, contact Maurice Bobb of Waste Management for more information. And if you get the job, be sure to write back to me on the sort of problems you look at. This could be a really fascinating operations research job.

I get a fair number of emails of the sort “I am studying at ….and I would like to work under your supervision as a summer intern”.  Most of the time they go on to say things like “I want to work under your supervision on stochastic optimization, supply chains, e-commerce” or an of a dozen things that suggest they 1) don’t know what I do, and 2) don’t really care to find out.  That is probably the economically efficient choice, since I don’t take on summer interns, and have even written about it.  I don’t know where this myth of summer internships for people from around the world comes from (unless there are a large group of people who welcome this?  Let me know!).

Once in a while, however, I see a summer internship and think:  “Wow!  I wish I was 20 (or 25) again!  That looks like a great opportunity!”  The Solver Foundation team just posted such an opportunity.  From the announcement:

The Solver Foundation team is looking for an intern for this summmer! A short description is below – this is a software development position, where the focus is on practical application of numerical optimization techniques. I believe in a practical, challenging, and hopefully rewarding experience where interns work on real code that relates to their areas of interest. If you’re interested, here’s what you should do:

• Apply for the position here. Make sure you apply under the “Software and Hardware Development” category.
• After you have applied, send a resume to natbr at microsoft dot com. We cannot guarantee a response to every inquiry due to volume.

A word of warning – this position is not for everyone. If things like simplex, L-BFGS, and KKT conditions are unfamiliar to you, this position might not be the best fit.

If you know what simplex, L-BFGS, and KKT mean, then this looks like an interesting way to spend the summer.  And they are pretty open with regards to education:

Bachelor’s, MS, or PhD students with deep knowledge of numerical optimization methods and software are particularly encouraged to apply.

This sounds a bit better than the Associate Dean gig I currently have, but I think I am stuck here.