Principal Research Scientist - Risk

What You Will Do

• Build and lead Neara’s applied research function for infrastructure risk and resilience.
• Direct a team of researchers and establish rigorous standards for risk modeling, uncertainty quantification, and decision-making.
• Develop predictive models for equipment damage, vegetation failure, outage likelihood and duration, and wildfire-related risk.
• Design decision models that quantify the operational and economic consequences of resilience and reliability investments, including asset replacement, vegetation management, and network redesign.
• Quantify the value of data including pole loading analysis, visual inspections, and the installation of new devices and remote sensing capabilities, both empirically and by analytical methods.

Who You Are

• A PhD in statistics, applied mathematics, physics, computer science, operations research, engineering, or a comparable record of original research and applied technical work.
• Evidence of having independently defined and led a substantial research program as a group leader or industry principal, demonstrated through influential publications, patents, or production systems.
• Experienced in building technical teams and setting research direction.
• Substantial experience in probabilistic modeling, uncertainty quantification, model validation, scientific computing capabilities and decision-making under incomplete information.
• Extensive experience in modeling operational systems, particularly relevant topics include insurance or catastrophe modeling; weather prediction and climate hazard; outages in power systems; and reliability engineering.

What We Offer

• A highly competitive compensation package including a significant equity component to ensure you directly benefit from Neara’s sustained success and impact on critical infrastructure.
• The opportunity to work on a cutting-edge, 3D physics-enabled platform used to anticipate the impact of extreme events, reduce infrastructure failure, and direct investment.
• Access to unique network-scale utility data unavailable in other industrial research settings.
• Freedom to define and build Neara’s research modeling function, establishing the agenda, identifying preferred methods and working on novel under-specified problems.
• A central role in shaping Neara’s long-term product roadmap, analytical standards and customer advisory services.
• Flexible hours and working arrangements designed to help you do your best work from where you work best.

Compensation Range

$180K - $220K