Senior Data Scientist, Operations Research (Care Operations)

Carrum Health; United States; Remote; USD 175,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Stock option plan

Performance bonus

Flexible schedules

Remote-friendly

Office options: Chicago & SF

Job summary

Carrum Health is seeking a Senior Data Scientist to redesign care delivery workflows, model capacity, and measure impact using rigorous data science methods. You will work with the Data team and care operations leadership to turn analyses into actionable changes that improve patient flow and resource utilization.

The role emphasizes production-quality Python and SQL, experiments with causal inference, and collaboration across multidisciplinary teams.

Qualifications

• Background in industrial or systems engineering, operations research, healthcare operations, or data science.
• Experience designing tests of operational changes with clear success measures.
• Experience with sequential decision-making such as bandits or optimal stopping.

Responsibilities

• Redesign how care gets delivered by shaping workflows and staffing.
• Use event data to map time and capacity across steps.
• Build capacity models to plan staffing and trade-offs.
• Design experiments and monitor changes after launch with causal inference when randomization isn't possible.
• Create measures that separate workload from skill and are trusted by the team.
• Develop routing and work allocation that respect capacity, skill, and licensing.

Skills

Operations research

Industrial engineering

Systems engineering

Data science

Python

SQL

Causal inference

Experimental design

Survival analysis

Multi-armed bandits

Optimization

Healthcare operations

Tools

OR-Tools

Gurobi

PuLP

Job description

At Carrum Health, we have built a unique marketplace for specialty care with unparalleled patient experience

Since 2014, we have been rewiring a fundamentally broken healthcare system. By connecting large employers directly with the nation's top-tier providers, our platform replaces a flawed fee-for-service model with one that actually works. If you are passionate about solving complex economic problems, driving systemic change in our healthcare system, and thriving in a people-first culture, we want you on our team. As a high-growth health tech company, we are seeking high-performing, exceptional talent to scale our platform and ensure that anyone in the country facing a specialty procedure has access to the life-changing Carrum benefit.

Our Marketplace Creates Massive Value For All Stakeholders

• For Employers (Demand): Predictable, transparent pricing that slashes specialty care costs by up to 45% and eliminates waste
• For Providers (Supply): Ability to gain market share while reducing administrative burden, empowering top-tier doctors to focus completely on delivering optimal care.
• For Members (Users): A life-changing benefit with dedicated concierges, VIP access to the nation's best specialists, and little-to-no out-of-pocket costs.

The salary range for this role is $175,000 - $200,000 depending on geography and level of experience, plus equity and an annual bonus.

Our care navigation team guides members from their first conversation with us through treatment and recovery. It’s a 10-step process with many actions at each step, carried out by care navigators, patient access coordinators, and nurses, and there’s significant room to grow how much it can deliver.

We’re seeking a Senior Data Scientist with an operations research or industrial and systems engineering mindset to make this operation better: redesign how the work flows, prove which changes work, and keep monitoring them. If you’ve improved patient flow in a hospital or throughput on an operations floor and you love the rigor of measuring what actually worked, this role is for you.

You’ll be part of our Data team and work day-to-day with care operations leadership as a thought partner, bringing options and a recommendation, not just analysis.

You’re Excited About This Opportunity Because You Will…

• Redesign how care gets delivered: Shape how work flows and is divided across workforces, from queue design and triage to staffing, and name the structural fixes before reaching for algorithms.
• See the whole operation: Use our event data to find where time and capacity go across a multi-step, multi-workforce process.
• Size capacity to demand: Build capacity models grounded in queueing fundamentals that leadership uses to plan staffing and make trade-offs.
• Turn ideas into answers: Design the tests for care model and workflow changes so each one ends in a clear answer, use causal inference when a test isn’t possible, and monitor changes after launch.
• Measure performance fairly: Build measures that separate workload from skill, and that the team trusts.
• Optimize under real constraints: Build routing and work allocation that respect capacity, skill, and licensing. As the operation matures, extend this to prioritization and stopping policies that people follow every day.

We’re Excited About You Because…

• You’ve redesigned an operation that people adopted: You’ve changed how a real operation runs (a workflow, a queue structure, a staffing model) and a frontline team adopted it, with a measured result. Ideally, you’ve also run an operational experiment that changed a decision. Your background might be in industrial or systems engineering, operations research, healthcare operations, or data science.
• You find where time goes and fix the structure: You’ve mapped a multi-step, multi-workforce flow from event data and found where time and capacity were lost. You’ve divided work across teams, sized capacity to demand, and fixed structure before optimizing.
• You turn messy operations into solvable problems: You’ve taken a real operational problem, framed it as an assignment, routing, or allocation problem, and shipped a solution people used with an optimization library or solver (e.g., OR-Tools, Gurobi, PuLP). You know when a good heuristic beats an exact solver.
• You make experiments end in an answer: You design tests of operational changes with success measures agreed up front and keep monitoring after launch. When you can’t randomize, you estimate causal effects from observational data and keep association and effect apart in your own writing.
• Your measures hold up: You build performance and outcome measures that separate workload from skill, and you’ve used survival and hazard models on censored data, since most of our episode questions are time-to-event problems.
• You’re rigorous about what’s true: You look for the confound in your own findings before anyone else does, and you validate AI-assisted work rather than accepting it.
• You write production-quality Python and SQL: You ship tools and analyses that others can run and rely on.
• You translate both ways: You can turn an operations frustration into a well-posed problem, and a result into what a frontline team should do differently on Monday. You stay steady when the people your numbers describe push back.
• You handle healthcare data responsibly: You understand minimum-necessary access to sensitive data.
• Big plus: Experience with sequential decision-making, such as bandits or optimal stopping.
• Bonus: Simulation, workforce scheduling, process mining, or a healthcare operations background such as hospital patient flow or capacity management.

Why you’ll love working with us…

• We’re a hard-working, humble, and compassionate group motivated to solve the hard problems in healthcare today. You’ll work with talented, experienced co-workers from companies like Booz & Company, Teladoc, Hinge Health, Accolade, Angi, and Optum.
• We champion a collaborative environment where team members can be autonomous, receive support and healthy feedback, and bring their authentic selves to work.
• We carve out time to celebrate our successes and have fun. We’re a remote-first company with employees all over the United States. We offer holistic employee support with flexible working hours, generous time off, paid parental leave, opportunities to connect virtually and in-person, and more.
• We embrace our team’s diversity of thought, experience, and interests and know that doing so makes us stronger as a company. Carrum has an active employee-led Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice (DEIJ) committee alongside several employee resource groups (ERGs) that support parents, women, and various underrepresented groups.
• You’ll feel proud that the work you do each day directly impacts people’s lives in big and meaningful ways.
• Carrum is remote-first, but we believe the best work often happens in person. This role may include occasional travel for team offsites, client events, or company gatherings.

Other Benefits

• Stock option plan and performance bonus for eligible employees
• Flexible schedules and remote work
• Chicago and San Francisco offices available as an option
• Flexible PTO, within reason
• Summer Fridays (sign off @ 1pm local time)
• 15+ paid holidays, including Juneteenth, World Mental Health Day, and Carrum Health Day
• Annual holiday shutdown in December
• Paid parental leave
• Health, vision, and dental insurance
• Employee Assistance Programs (EAP)
• 401K retirement plan

About Carrum

Carrum Health’s mission is to change how we pay for and deliver specialty care. We offer self-insured employers and plan sponsors a value-based specialty care platform that connects their members with a rigorously vetted network of specialty care providers. Carrum’s transparent, all-inclusive bundled pricing, award-winning technology, and dedicated care navigation team help lower costs for both members and employers while delivering a superior member experience. Carrum is independently validated to reduce unnecessary procedures by as much as 30%, lower readmissions by 80%, and save employers up to 45% per episode of surgical care. Learn more at carrumhealth.com.

Since launching in 2014, we’ve partnered with top-quality providers across the nation including Cleveland Clinic, Johns Hopkins, Mayo Clinic, Stanford Health Care, and a growing network of 1,400+ COEs. We serve hundreds of self-insured employers including Fortune 50 companies, such as United Airlines, US Foods, and Prudential, and public sector clients such as the States of Maine, Nevada, Tennessee, and Self-Insured Schools of California.

The impact of our platform has been validated by a landmark RAND Corporation study, honored with prestigious awards from institutions like Harvard Business School & Harvard Medical School, and featured as a Harvard Business School case study.

As a recognized digital health leader, Carrum is frequently covered by national media, including Bloomberg, Fast Company, Fierce Healthcare, Fortune, Los Angeles Times, Reuters, TechCrunch, and U.S News & World Report. Backed by $96M from top-tier investors including OMERS, Tiger Global Management, Revelation Partners and Wildcat Ventures, we’re only scratching the surface of our opportunity. Come join us.

Carrum Health is an equal opportunity employer and encourages all applicants from every background and life experience.

A Note on Recruitment Safety:

To protect yourself against recruitment fraud, please note that Carrum Health will only communicate via an @carrumhealth.com email address. We do not conduct interviews via text or messaging apps, nor do we ever request financial information or fees during the hiring process. All authentic job openings are posted at carrumhealth.com/careers. If you are unsure about the legitimacy of a communication, please verify it via [e-mail].