Lead Risk & Resilience Modeler

First Street is seeking a Lead Risk & Resilience Modeler in Blackstone, MA, to develop loss models that connect climate and financial risks for various asset types. The role requires expertise in engineering, materials science, and data science to create models of structural damage and downtime due to natural hazards. Candidates will analyze data, validate models, and leverage academic insights to enhance modeling approaches.
Who we are: First Street is the standard for Climate Risk Financial Modeling. We use transparent and peer-reviewed methodologies to calculate the past, present, and future climate risk for every property in the world. We started working with the world’s leading climate scientists to create groundbreaking, climate-adjusted, property specific models over 8 years ago and haven’t stopped.

Our mission: We exist to connect climate and financial risk.

Our data: We create physics-based, deterministic models of flooding, wildfire and hurricanes, and advanced statistical models of extreme heat, air quality, drought, hail, severe convective storms, winter storms, and more. All of this data is used to create property-level financial risk metrics and macroeconomic variables to quantify the impacts of climate, property by property

Our customers: We empower governments at the highest levels to make smart regulations, businesses to avoid bad investments, and everyday Americans to understand their personal risk from climate change. We are relied on every day by:
• Agencies ranging from the U.S. Department of Treasury to Fannie Mae
• The world's biggest banks such as Bank of America and Wells Fargo
• Institutional investors like Nuveen and Blackstone
• Millions of everyday users on Zillow, Redfin, , , and more

We believe: With the right data, we can identify the problems, avoid bad investments, and implement solutions. This is why we have invested tens of millions of dollars into our science, data, people, and products and have raised tens of millions more to move even faster. Read more about our culture here and see what Climate Risk Financial Modeling is all about here
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Come join us and use your talents to change the world.

Team & Role Overview:

We are looking for an expert in risk and resilience of the built environment. Our Science teams build world class hazard models across several perils, and this person will work with them to build world class loss models of the risk for a variety of asset types. The loss models will represent structure damages and associated downtime from exposure to natural hazards like flood, wildfire, and wind, enabling our customers to connect physical risk to financial risk.

The Lead Risk & Resilience Engineer will have a background in a combination of engineering, materials science, resilience, cost estimation, and data science. A successful candidate will demonstrate the capability to solve technical challenges in data poor areas.

What you’ll do:
• Connect climate and financial risk by developing custom loss models representing impacts to structures and infrastructure assets globally to pair with First Street’s hazard models
• Create models of structure damage, repair time, and indirect impacts using a combination of approaches including first principles of engineering, cost estimation, statistics, and machine learning.
• Analyze historical loss observational data to improve model accuracy, identify quality control issues, and develop suggested remedies for identified issues.
• Perform statistical analysis to validate loss model predictions and assess model uncertainties.
• Conduct background research and using insights from the current state of academic literature to inform approaches in quantitative modeling.
• Analyze building codes and exposure datasets to identify common construction practices globally to inform loss model section
• Create property level adaptation scenarios that enable customers to understand the return on investment of personal property protections
• Provide technical leadership to junior staff and provide ownership of loss modeling methodologies and data

What you’ll need:
• Experience working with multi-hazard data, catastrophe models, building level damage data, and construction cost estimation data
• Expertise using scripted languages like Python to build data pipelines on both local and cloud-based systems
• Expertise with big data analysis in high performance compute environments, either on premises or on cloud platforms including AWS, GCP, and/or Azure
• Proficiency with source control platforms such as Git
• A science-based approach with a high degree of concern for reliability, accuracy and…