Applied Scientist

Visa Hunt; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 160,000 - 225,000; Full time

Job summary

Clipboard is building a new Applied Science team and is looking for its first outside hire. You’ll help design the quantitative infrastructure that underpins the marketplace, including pricing algorithms, auction mechanisms, and causal models used to guide product decisions.

Working with a three-person pod and an engineering rotation, you’ll move models from prototype to production, define metric definitions, run controlled experiments, and interpret results to support leadership and PMs.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in quantitative field.
• Experience building and deploying quantitative models.
• Comfort querying data directly (SQL or equivalent).
• Experience designing and analyzing controlled experiments.

Responsibilities

• Design pricing algorithms and auction mechanisms for the marketplace.
• Develop attendance and reliability models for worker–workplace relationships.
• Build and maintain experiment frameworks used across teams.
• Collaborate with engineers to move models from prototype to production.
• Investigate causes when key metrics move unexpectedly.

Skills

Quantitative modeling

Causal inference

Experiment design

Data querying

Education

PhD in economics or related field

Bachelor's degree in quantitative field

Tools

SQL

Python

Job description

About Clipboard

Our mission is to uplift as many communities as possible. We do this through our app-based marketplace that connects healthcare professionals with the workplaces that need amazing workers. This enables hundreds of thousands of people to achieve financial stability for themselves and their families while providing essential care to millions of people across the U.S.

Founded in 2016, we are a remote-first team of over 1,000 people building a top Y-Combinator company and have been profitable since 2022. We’re the leader in Long-Term Care staffing and are rapidly expanding into Home Health, Hospitals, and more, meaning we have more work to do than people to do it, and are growing our team to support millions more people and their communities.

About the Role

We're building a new team, Applied Science, and we're looking for our first outside hire.

Clipboard is a Sequoia-backed marketplace connecting nurses and healthcare professionals with long-term care facilities, with over $800M in annual transactions. You'd be joining a three-person quantitative pod with a dedicated engineering rotation that has spent the last year shipping auction systems in a live, two-sided market. We're now formalizing that work into a dedicated Applied Science function. The team owns the quantitative infrastructure underneath the marketplace: pricing algorithms, auction mechanisms, causal models, metric definitions, and experiment frameworks. Some of that work ships as product; some becomes the analytical substrate every team in the company depends on.

About the Work

You'll be designing systems where the analytical choices are the product decisions. Concretely, you’ll be building pricing algorithms, designing auction mechanisms that shape how supply and demand interact, developing attendance and reliability models that determine worker-workplace relationships, and constructing the experiment frameworks the rest of the org runs its ideas through. When a key metric moves and the cause isn't obvious, you'll run the investigation.

Methods in play include causal identification (diff-in-diff, IV, regression discontinuity), cluster-randomized trial design, discrete-time hazard modeling, mechanism design, and anomaly detection on marketplace time series. You'll work directly with engineers to take models from prototype to production, and write clearly enough to make your reasoning legible to PMs and leadership.

Minimum Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in quantitative field: economics, statistics, engineering, mathematics, etc or commensurate practical experience.
• Experience building and deploying quantitative models (in applied or research settings)
• Comfort querying data directly (SQL or equivalent)
• Experience designing and analyzing controlled experiments

Who thrives here

• PhD in economics, econometrics, operations research, statistics, engineering, or a closely related field. Equivalent depth from a quant research or trading environment.
• Track record of building applied models, not just publishing them; you've taken something from whiteboard to production.
• Sharp experimental intuition: you know the difference between a valid identification strategy and a plausible-sounding one, and you've defended that distinction in front of a skeptical audience.
• Background in quant finance, economic consulting, or marketplace work is a strong signal. We want people comfortable collaborating with competing ideas in high-stakes data environments.

Compensation

$160K-$225K base + $50K-$150K equity. Range reflects experience; we'll be direct about where you'd land.

Work Location

This will be a hybrid role, with the expectation of working at least three days per week out of our office in San Francisco.