Plant Breeding Data Scientist

Are you better at statistics than most programmers and better at programming than most statisticians? Do you feel equally excited about working at a corn field and working at a command line? Do you aspire to translate new ideas into realized improvements in breeding strategy? If you answered yes to these questions, read on – you might be a good fit for our Data Scientist position.We need Breeding Data Scientists to collaborate with visionary plant breeders, biostatisticians, genomicists, and crop scientists to build digitally enabled science and business capabilities. Join us and use your data science skillset to contribute to our team and help us on our mission!Corteva Agriscience has a rich history of scientific discovery that has enabled countless innovations. We’re looking for more people, in more places, to collaborate with us to create a market-shaping agriculture company with leading positions in seed technologies, crop protection and digital agriculture.

What You'll Do:

• Join a small but well-connected science team that is leading the effort to drive innovative predictive breeding, continuous improvement of data collection and analysis, and pilot algorithmically enhanced decision making across Corteva’s breeding organization.
• Engage directly with a team of plant breeders, domain scientists, data scientists, and software developers assembled to identify business problems, discover new data opportunities, provide data driven solutions, and translate critical research questions into algorithmic frameworks and solutions.
• Manage deployment of new approaches to breeding decisions directly to breeding teams.
• Identify, acquire, and engineer feature data sets with potential to address customer needs.
• Apply machine learning, statistical or mechanistic models and other computational approaches to extract insights from datasets in complex agronomic systems.
• Collaborate with scientists from multiple domains in solution/experiment design and analyses.
• Conduct and communicate results of research on data science approaches to improve decisions, add value to services, extend or improve in-house models and algorithms, and contribute to the advancement of these ideas into the marketplace.
• Uphold Corteva Agriscience Core Values at all times.

What Skills You Need:

• Outstanding problem-solving skills and a proven ability to independently deliver analytic solutions by asking the right questions, identifying necessary data sources, analyzing structured and unstructured data, building and validating predictive models, and producing actionable results.
• Demonstrated experience in using machine learning, deep learning, data mining, statistical methodology, or simulation modeling.
• Working knowledge of optimization techniques, especially in the areas of unconstrained optimization, greedy algorithms, dynamic and linear programming, network flows, and genetic algorithms.
• Experience with complex cross validation, such as data with unbalanced hierarchical nesting and/or time series components.
• Expert in scientific computing and high-performance math libraries with Python or R in Linux command-line environments.
• Strong skills in building visualizations of scientific data including a working knowledge of at least one scientific user interface framework such as Dash/Plotly or RShiny.
• Proven ability to work in a team setting and ability to complete complex projects on time and in budget.
• Superior communication skills, both verbal and written.
• A PhD in Plant Breeding, Genetics, Data Science, Statistics , Mathematics, or with demonstrated data science applications or demonstrated equivalent work experience is required.

What Makes You Stand Out:

• Familiarity and experience with biological systems, plant breeding, quantitative genetics, and genomics data.
• Experience bringing machine learning and/or artificial intelligence to quantitative science problems where none existed before.
• Comfort in using cloud based systems and services, especially AWS.
• Experience building and sharing documented, reusable software libraries for scientific efforts

Benefits – How We’ll Support You:

• Numerous development opportunities offered to build your skills
• Be part of a company with a higher purpose and contribute to making the world a better place
• Health benefits for you and your family on your first day of employment
• Four weeks of paid time off and two weeks of well-being pay per year, plus paid holidays
• Excellent parental leave which includes a minimum of 16 weeks for mother and father
• Future planning with our competitive retirement savings plan and tuition reimbursement program

• Learn more about our total rewards package here - Corteva Benefits

• Check out life at Corteva! www.linkedin.com/company/corteva/life

Are you a good match? Apply today! We seek applicants from all backgrounds to ensure we get the best, most creative talent on our team.