Research Scientist

Summary

Join Opendoor as a Research Scientist and contribute to cutting-edge applied machine learning and AI initiatives. You will significantly impact valuation systems by ensuring accurate and transparent pricing. The role involves tackling diverse ML challenges, including multi-modal modeling and operational optimization. You will leverage structured and unstructured data to improve customer decision-making. Collaborate with cross-functional teams and communicate technical concepts effectively. The position offers opportunities to work across the entire research and modeling stack within a small, agile team.

Requirements

• Strong software engineering and coding skills in Python, with experience contributing to production codebases
• 5+ years of experience developing and deploying ML models end-to-end — from research and prototyping to implementation in production systems
• Hands-on experience with deep learning architectures, including ConvNets, Transformers, or similar
• Advanced degree (MS or PhD) in computer science, statistics, mathematics, or a related quantitative field
• Solid foundation in statistics and experimental design
• Strong communication and collaboration skills — you’re comfortable working with cross-functional stakeholders and can communicate technical ideas clearly

Responsibilities

• Design and deploy architectural improvements to our deep neural network (DNN)-based home valuation models
• Build interpretable ML models that can help us explain pricing decisions to customers
• Incorporate unstructured data — like images, videos, or text — into our forecasting and valuation pipelines using cutting-edge AI models (LLMs, VLMs, etc.)
• Collaborate with Engineering and Ops to enhance our human-in-the-loop pricing systems
• Improve the feature engineering and model training pipelines that power our production systems
• Rethink our risk and optimization models using real-world data and domain insight

Preferred Qualifications

• Familiarity with Pyspark and distributed data processing
• Background in search, recommendation systems, or personalization
• Experience working with large language models (LLMs) or vision-language models (VLMs)
• A genuine interest in real estate — no prior experience required, but you'll engage deeply with housing data

Benefits

• Medical/dental/vision insurance
• Life insurance
• 401(k)
• Unlimited PTO