RockCreek is a leading global investment management firm that applies data-driven technology and innovation to sustainable investing. Our portfolio managers invest in emerging markets and alternatives, and our asset allocation teams invest in multi-asset class and outsourced CIO portfolios and customized solutions. RockCreek’s client base is made up of sophisticated institutional investors, including endowments, foundations, pension plans, and sovereign funds. The firm is highly focused on the integration of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors and sustainable impact across portfolios to generate long-term returns. RockCreek is a collaborative environment that values openness, transparency, partnership, and knowledge sharing. Diversity, debate and a relentless drive to excel are foundations of our team culture.

Technology is a key, and growing, part of our service offerings. We are committed to best-of-breed applications, automation, and solutions for managing funds and portfolios across our broad range of investment offerings. In addition to launching a dedicated advanced analytics team, we are currently consolidating our data assets into a large data lake on Amazon Web Services and providing a variety of API and programmatic access patterns.

RockCreek seeks a Data Scientist to apply innovative data-driven methods and advanced analytics to inform investment choices and expand our leadership in ESG investing. As one of the founding members of our expanded analytics team, you will play a leading role in designing our data architecture, building models, pioneering new metrics, and visualizing data. The right candidate will have an inquisitive mind for understanding the power and limitations of data, an entrepreneurial approach to building new tools and applications, and a passion for responsibly harnessing data to drive ethical investment decisions.

This position is based in RockCreek’s Washington, DC, office. Travel is not expected to be frequent. You may occasionally travel to our New York office or interact with partner organizations.

Roles and Responsibilities

You will be responsible for designing, developing, and deploying new analytic models, approaches and products.

Design:

• Define goals, identify data assets, and develop models and validation processes to help partners translate insights into action at scale
• Determine priorities by estimating potential impact of model and feature development projects
• Research and develop data science solutions to support RockCreek’s investment decisions
• Maintain current knowledge of the data science landscape, including toolsets, data platforms and services, and public data sets
• Partner with colleagues to understand cross-organization analytical needs, define the right questions, propose recommendations, and communicate results effectively
• Understand and define the structure and architecture of various internal and external data sources and structure new data to make integration with our platform easy

Develop:

• Analyze complex data sets from multiple data sources, originating both internally and externally
• Build processes for security, performance, reliability, and accuracy
• Develop algorithms for feature extraction and feature engineering from multiple signal sources
• Enhance automation, operation, and expansion of real-time and batch data environment
• Visualize data in a digestible way for internal and external stakeholders
• Build machinery to extract insights from historical systems to forecast future performance
• Work across our teams and relevant vendors to drive the collection of new data, evaluate existing data sources, and verify data integrity
• Extract, transform, and load complex data into data warehouses using cutting-edge technologies

Deliver:

• Develop and maintain custom data models to drive innovative business solutions
• Participate in the evaluation, selection, and development of data analysis products, dashboard and reporting tools, and other data visualization solutions
• Apply standard machine learning and data mining techniques and toolkits as appropriate
• Coach and mentor technical and non-technical colleagues on analytics and data visualization
• Demonstrate ongoing commitment to diversity and respect differences in race, ethnicity, age, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, religion, ability, and socio-economic circumstance
• Work collaboratively and respectfully toward resolving obstacles and conflicts

• Minimum of 3-5+ years of experience using applying data and advanced analytics tools in a business or academic setting
• Advanced degree (Masters or Ph.D.) in a quantitative field (e.g., Statistics, Econometrics, Economics, Data Science, Mathematics, Computer Science) or equivalent experience
• Deep experience solving analytical problems through data-driven, quantitative approaches, including statistical methods, machine learning techniques, and predictive models
• Strong understanding of financial concepts and data, with direct experience developing and evaluating financial industry models preferred
• Experience translating user requirements, diverse data, and advanced algorithms into actionable, understandable insights for non-technical users
• Proven track record working cross-functionally and collaborating with engineering, client services, and reporting teams to balance multiple projects and stakeholders
• Entrepreneurial, comfortable carrying projects from blueprinting to scoping and implementation
• Exceptional curiosity and problem solving, with a real passion for catalyzing impact with analytics
• Excellent organizational and communication skills
• Strong interest in sustainability and ethics, including investments guided by ESG principles 

Technical Requirements:

• Fluency with modeling in Python or R, or similar analytics and programming languages
• Experience with relational modeling, database applications and integrations, ETL tools, client/server solutions, and MySQL or similar query language and tools such as Tableau
• Familiarity with Linux/Unix/BSD command-line tools and shell scripting
• Experience with and passion for data visualization techniques and concepts
• Experience with big data frameworks and deep learning toolkits preferred
• Experience and community involvement with open-source applications preferred
• Experience evaluating data quality, model bias, and algorithm accuracy

Mission Statement:

RockCreek is a leading global investment management firm that applies data-driven technology and innovation to sustainable investing. We believe sustainability and diversity generate superior performance by investing in long term value. We have stable and long‐term partnerships with our clients and companies and attract the best mission‐oriented team. Sustainable investing extends throughout our investments, our diverse team and culture, our office environment, operations and travel.

ESG Policy:

Since our founding, RockCreek’s commitment to sustainable investing, long term value creation, and good governance has begun at home. We believe RockCreek’s entrepreneurial spirit, open culture, and diverse team lead to better investments on behalf of the universities, foundations, pension plans, and sovereign funds that partner with us. The way we operate our offices, procure services, and partner with stakeholders are all in keeping with our aim to have a positive impact on markets globally and reduce our carbon footprint. This strong stable culture values diversity and inclusion as well as a commitment to investing responsibly for long term returns. RockCreek is among the largest woman-founded firms in the world. Its founders have a deep commitment to sustainability as well as long experience with sustainable impact investing and ESG policies that date back to 1980s. This includes investing in energy, health, technology and financial inclusion.

RockCreek is a collaborative environment that values openness, transparency, partnership, and knowledge sharing. In a typical day you will interact with members of all of our teams; engineering is neither siloed nor cut off from the overall RockCreek business. You should be both interested and capable of learning the investment business as it relates to engineering, and creatively looking to enhance the overall RockCreek service offerings.