Flatiron Institute hiring: postdocs, joint faculty, and permanent research positions

This is Bob.

We’re hiring

It’s that time of year again and we’re hiring at all levels at the Center for Computational Mathematics (CCM) at Flatiron Institute (the in-house research arm of Simons Foundation). As they are listed, job ads will appear here:

• CCM job listings

Our mission

I finally work at a place whose mission aligns with what I actually do.

The mission of the Flatiron Institute is to advance scientific research through computational methods, including data analysis, theory, modeling and simulation.

This place is entirely researcher driven. This is the only top-down directive I have, and I can choose what I work on as long as I stay productive and on mission.

About Flatiron Institute

In addition to CCM, Flatiron has centers devoted to computational biology, computational neuroscience, computational astrophysics, and computational quantum physics (not to be confused with quantum computing). It’s a very problem-rich environment, because all these domain scientists have lots of interesting data (for example, I spent an hour yesterday talking to a CCB researcher about his data involving flies jumping when exposed to light, and we went over how to build hierarchical Bayesian time series model and I wrote some Stan code to match). Each center is comprised of roughly 60 people, around 30 of whom are full-time research scientists, 20 of whom are postdocs, 5 of whom are software engineers, and 3 of whom are dedicated admin staff.

We also have a dedicated high-performance computing group, the Scientific Compute Core (SCC), and a massive (for academia) compute cluster with hundreds of H100 GPUs and hundreds of thousands of CPU cores.

It’s all on site

We do not hire remotely for full-time jobs. Luckily, our offices are really nice, bright, and well maintained from IT to physical facilities.

P.S. “Flatiron” is the name of the neighborhood—our offices are two blocks south of the Flatiron Building, in one of the nicest areas of Manhattan (a short walk to NYU, Google, and Meta).

About CCM

Our work can broadly be categorized into traditional numerical analysis and scientific computing, computational statistics, and machine learning. In all of these areas, we work on theory, algorithms, and release open-source software. All of our research and external funding is funded through the $5 billion endowment for Simons Foundation—we are not allowed to apply for grants. As an aside, Simons Foundation hands out over $300 million in science funding per year.

We have really great software engineers; in particular, Brian Ward and Steve Bronder work with me on Stan-related projects and with other people on other projects across Flatiron. There’s much more of a career track here for software than in academia, and it’s allowed us to recruit really top-notch people.

We also have a fantastic admin staff, which makes an incredible difference.

Flatiron research fellows (aka postdocs)

We hire postdocs for three years. We’ll be trying to hire around 6 postdocs this year across the areas of CCM interest. I’ll be out of postdocs after this year—Yuling Yao started a faculty job at UT-Austin, Charles Margossian is on the job market, and Sifan Liu (technically visiting faculty) will be starting her faculty job at Duke next year.

In general, we realize that our postdocs can’t strictly follow our mission if they want to get an academic job, because academia still doesn’t value software contributions very much. Nevertheless, I would very much like to recruit someone who’s just as interested in contributing to open-source software as publishing NeurIPS papers. One of our recent postdocs, Wenda Zhou, who did his Ph.D. in stats at Columbia, used his time here to retool as a neural network researcher and ML engineer—he now works at OpenAI.

Joint faculty position with Cooper Union

This year, we’re looking to hire someone for a joint position with Cooper Union, an engineering-focused college in NYC. Here’s the job posting:

• Cooper Union Computer Science /Flatiron Institute CCM: joint tenure-track faculty position

It’s 3 years of a 50-50 position, then transitions to “full” time at Cooper Union (scare quotes because academic jobs in the U.S. are typically 9 month jobs). That’ll be good for tenure decisions because academic departments have a hard time with split commitments.

Research scientists

We have a few openings across ML and statistics for permanent research scientist positions. We’re looking for people with at least a few years experience post-Ph.D., but will consider people just finishing a first postdoc. We can also hire much more senior research scientists like me or Lawrence Saul, our head of ML. I would ideally like to hire someone who has worked on both computational Bayesian statistics and on neural networks.

We’re still tweaking the job ad, but it’ll go out any day now and show up on the list posted above.