<p>We're hiring for someone to lead our algorithms development. The purpose of this letter is to help you decide if this role is the right one for you. And if it turns out this is a fit, my claim is that you will be hard-pressed to find something more meaningful and impactful for your life and career.</p><p>It will take you some time to read through, but if you do, you should learn something new, have a clear sense of what we're working on and if you'll thrive in our current environment.  You won't find traditional requirements. Mostly because this isn't a traditional role. For the right person, this could be a once-in-lifetime chance to do something that matters and propels your personal growth.</p><p>Thanks in advance for reading &amp; sleep well,</p><p>Leon</p><p>Co-founder, CTO @ Rise Science</p><hr><h2>What are we working on at Rise Science?</h2><p>The short answer: we're building a sleep app for everyday-people that helps you be less tired and get more out of your day.</p><p>Sleep is the most potent performance enhancing drug known to humans. It's the foundation of literally everything we can measure about you. And it's your nights that dictate your days.</p><p>Read about how we got started: <a href="https://www.notion.so/Founder-Story-c65ae47f62014c4ba6ebdf02280d4c0b">Our founders' journey to sleep and its importance</a>.</p><p>You might ask “Does the world need another sleep app?” The answer is, no, it doesn’t. At least not a traditional one...</p><p>Through years of user research and product development, we learned that&nbsp;<strong>people don’t want to spend more time sleeping.</strong></p><p>What people&nbsp;<em>really</em>&nbsp;want is to have more energy.</p><p>It turns out that the biggest determinant of your energy levels is your sleep. However, the tools available today only address part of the problem. Some are trying to help you fall asleep (like Calm) and others aim to measure your sleep (like Fitbit, WHOOP, &amp; Oura). None of these services are designed to help you feel better and have more energy. In fact, a recent peer-reviewed paper shows that while WHOOP's tracker is accurate for measuring sleep it&nbsp;<strong>does not effectively improve sleep behavior</strong>. For people to feel better&nbsp;<em>sleep tracking is necessary but not sufficient</em>.</p><p><strong>RISE is not a sleep tracker.</strong>&nbsp;Our mission is to affect long-term behavior change to help people feel better and have more energy. After all, that is what people want. And to do that, you need to make the feedback loop between your sleep and your daily energy instant. We are not alone, the academic literature backs this up: BJ Fogg says that “it’s emotion that creates behavior, not repetition.” And this is why our company is called Rise&nbsp;<em>Science</em>. We couple peer-reviewed science with constant user feedback to guide our product development.</p><p>It’s taken a decade of rigorous work and research to get here. We’ve invested millions of dollars (from the investors behind Peloton, Fitbit, Spotify, Facebook, and Twitter). We’ve studied tens of thousands of users – high schoolers to pro athletes, working parents to retirees - to design and build scientifically robust algorithms to help people live the best lives possible.</p><p>If you want to see it for yourself,&nbsp;<a href="https://apps.apple.com/us/app/rise-track-sleep-circadian/id1453884781">start a free trial</a>.</p><h3>The work we do next will determine our success</h3><p>While we’re not an established category with millions of paid subscribers, you’re not starting from scratch. Our product works well, we have tens of thousands of happy customers, and a scalable path to impact more people. We didn’t get lucky on product. We got here with a human-centered product team. But <strong>the work we do next</strong>, together, will ultimately determine how many lives we can improve and write the Rise Science story. We now need to take what we've done, scale it 100x, while continuously improving the experience for our future million subscribers. At the scale we're running, even a 1% improvement in our models will translate to improving the lives of an additional 10,000 people.</p><h3>Some challenges of working at Rise Science and this role</h3><ul>
<li>You'll be the first full-time person working on our algorithms and data stack. While we have many of the key ingredients in place, you'll be expected to help stand up our processes and systems. <em>If you don't enjoy starting from scratch and prefer going into a team where most things are in place, this role may not be the best fit.</em></li>
<li>You'll be working with both statistical as well as heuristic-based algorithms. Part of your job will be deciding which techniques to use to make our product better.  <em>If you only like working with very specific techniques (say only deep learning), this may not be the job for you.</em></li>
<li>Our core algorithms are both server-side in python and client-side in Swift or Kotlin. <em>While we don't expect you to be proficient in new languages, if you don't like learning new languages and toolkits, you may not enjoy it here.</em></li>
<li>The academic community is very active in the fields of sleep and chronobiology. That means we'll need you to be able to read new research and use new findings as part of your models. That could mean adding new inputs to existing models, or using new techniques and implementations. <em>If you're not comfortable reading academic papers and translating them into working code, systems and products, it will be extra challenging to solve these problems.</em></li>
</ul><h3>A few of the example projects that we expect you to work and thrive on during your first few months with us:</h3><ul>
<li>Lead a key project to improve our sleep detection algorithms. Work closely with our heads of product and design to design how we communicate changes and gather real-time user feedback on the improvements.</li>
<li>Develop and release an improvement to our circadian algorithm within our python backend, based on some of the latest published studies we've been following.</li>
<li>Implement a reliable and robust closed-loop system to measure and improve our core model accuracy.</li>
<li>Work closely with the product team and founders to have good predictors for a user's success with RISE so we can better prioritize our roadmap.</li>
<li>Roll out a better outlier-detection system to our client-side algorithms in Swift that significantly improves the experience for new subscribers.</li>
</ul><p>While we're not dogmatic about tools, we use a variety of different ones to power our product and company. Knowledge and experience in many of these will be handy, but it is not expected you have deep expertise in all of them. As the first hire to our data &amp; algorithms function, you will have autonomy and our trust to add new tools and techniques to our repertoire.</p><ul>
<li>Python+Django for production web code as well as deep integrations with the numpy and pandas data stack.</li>
<li>Majority of computations built using numpy and pandas.</li>
<li>Postgres as our main datastore. Firestore for syncing data to our mobile app and offline access. Snowflake as our data warehouse.</li>
<li>Jupyter notebooks for data exploration and algorithm development.</li>
<li>Redis for caching and as a swiss-army for non-durable data needs.</li>
<li>Celery plus a home grown job-queue system on top of RabbitMQ.</li>
<li>Swift for our iOS client-side and data processing and algorithms.</li>
<li>React Native powers our core mobile app.</li>
<li>AWS Lambda for a few infinitely scalable entry points.</li>
</ul><h2>Some reasons you might like working with us</h2><ul>
<li><strong>You'll do work most days that will directly improve people's lives</strong>. The code you write and the systems you keep up will help more people become better at sleeping. Each PR, deploy, and performance improvement will have a direct impact on our users. Each member of the team shares this daily mission. What you do each day directly contributes to the health, happiness, productivity, and longevity of the world.</li>
<li>We don't chase shiny new technology. Most of the time, <a href="http://boringtechnology.club/">choosing boring technology is better.</a> But we aren't luddites. Occasionally it makes sense to adopt new things quickly, like we did with React Native, Swift, ECS and Lambda.</li>
<li>More than anything else, we realize that <a href="http://paulgraham.com/vb.html">life is short</a>. So even though we're solving an unthinkably large problem, <strong>taking time for yourself and your family is essential</strong>. Without it, we don't believe you can live your best life and do your life's work. And of course, we'll get your sleep in order 😉</li>
<li>One of our core values is growth. That means every week, we'll talk about how we can help you grow. What skills, experiences, people can <strong>help you get to your next career goal</strong>. For this role to be amazing, it has to be amazing for you.</li>
<li>You'll shape the long term direction and vision of our technology. Not just ship code, but own our direction and architecture. You will have the freedom to adopt technologies that you like.</li>
<li>You'll work alongside product, design, marketing, and customer success. You'll have opportunity to contribute meaningfully across the company (you'll be employee 9 or 10).</li>
<li>You won't have to convince anyone of the value of testing. We have extensive suites, but also know we have work to do here.</li>
</ul><h3>Compensation?</h3><p>We target 50th percentile for cash and 75th percentile for equity for companies of our size and capital raised. I'll share up to date market data with you so we're seeing the same data. We'll dig into specifics as soon as it's a clear fit on both sides.</p><h3>Location?</h3><p>US-friendly hours are strongly preferred. We’re a 100% distributed team (most in Eastern and Central time in the US) and we keep our meetings to an absolute minimum. However, we often work semi-synchronously so it’s important to have some solid workday overlap.</p><h2>If this sound interesting, let's talk.</h2><p>Instead of a cover letter, email me at <strong><a href="mailto:leon@risescience.com">leon@risescience.com</a></strong> | <strong>Subject: 'Rise Science Data &amp; Algorithms Lead</strong>' and include your answers to the questions below. We value great writing and clear thinking.  So take the time you need but the answers don't need to be long. For guardrails, try not to spend more than an hour.</p><ol>
<li>Tell me why this opportunity feels right to you. What did you respond to in the letter? What surprised/excited you about the opportunity?</li>
<li>What would your most recent manager rate you 1-10? Why?</li>
<li>Can you tell me what you like about your current role? And what do you find drains your energy there?</li>
<li>Tell me about a time when you implemented a new algorithm or model from scratch? What was the timeline like? What were some of the challenges?</li>
<li>Tell me about a time that you helped improve an existing rule-based system to an ML or statistical model?</li>
<li>Have you ever worked with collecting, analyzing, and modeling time-series data? What are some of the unique challenges?</li>
<li>Have you ever rolled out an algorithm or model to production and iterated on improvements? How did you approach the iterative process for continuous improvement on the performance, especially under new production data streams?</li>
<li>For which kind of problems and data domains would you use Bayesian approaches vs more traditional probabilistic methods?</li>
<li>Tell me about a time you were limited in your modeling and algorithm development because your dataset was limited, unstructured, or lacked definition. How did you go about working with other folks in your larger org to get through this challenge?</li>
</ol><h3><strong>What to expect next</strong></h3><p>I'll hand review what you send. I'll respond with either "I don't think the fit is here" or
that we should move forward in process. To make sure this is an amazing fit for you here's what the rest of process looks like assuming there's some fit:</p><p>



































</p><ol>
<li>
<p>We talk on the phone for 30 minutes and I ask questions about your past work and how it relates to what you'd be doing at Rise Science.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>You'll work on a take-home realistic challenge that should take you no more than 5 hours. This is designed to be similar in nature to the work you'll do here at Rise Science.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>A deep dive with a few of your potential future team members on both technical areas and non-technical areas. It would be 3-4 sessions over zoom. For example: walk through a modeling problem with our CTO, present an exploratory data analysis project to the team, or pair program with our backend lead to simulate the implementation of a production-ready model. You'll also be spending some time with our CEO learning about company culture, our vision, and product development beliefs.</p>
</li>
</ol>

We're hiring for someone to lead our algorithms development. The purpose of
this letter is to help you decide if this role is the right one for you. And
if it turns out this is a fit, my claim is that you will be hard-pressed to
find something more meaningful and impactful for your life and career.

It will take you some time to read through, but if you do, you should learn
something new, have a clear sense of what we're working on and if you'll
thrive in our current environment. You won't find traditional requirements.
Mostly because this isn't a traditional role. For the right person, this could
be a once-in-lifetime chance to do something that matters and propels your
personal growth.

Thanks in advance for reading & sleep well,

Leon

Co-founder, CTO @ Rise Science

* * *

## What are we working on at Rise Science?

The short answer: we're building a sleep app for everyday-people that helps
you be less tired and get more out of your day.

Sleep is the most potent performance enhancing drug known to humans. It's the
foundation of literally everything we can measure about you. And it's your
nights that dictate your days.

Read about how we got started: [Our founders' journey to sleep and its
importance](https://www.notion.so/Founder-
Story-c65ae47f62014c4ba6ebdf02280d4c0b).

You might ask “Does the world need another sleep app?” The answer is, no, it
doesn’t. At least not a traditional one...

Through years of user research and product development, we learned that
**people don’t want to spend more time sleeping.**

What people  _really_  want is to have more energy.

It turns out that the biggest determinant of your energy levels is your sleep.
However, the tools available today only address part of the problem. Some are
trying to help you fall asleep (like Calm) and others aim to measure your
sleep (like Fitbit, WHOOP, & Oura). None of these services are designed to
help you feel better and have more energy. In fact, a recent peer-reviewed
paper shows that while WHOOP's tracker is accurate for measuring sleep it
**does not effectively improve sleep behavior**. For people to feel better
_sleep tracking is necessary but not sufficient_.

 **RISE is not a sleep tracker.**  Our mission is to affect long-term behavior
change to help people feel better and have more energy. After all, that is
what people want. And to do that, you need to make the feedback loop between
your sleep and your daily energy instant. We are not alone, the academic
literature backs this up: BJ Fogg says that “it’s emotion that creates
behavior, not repetition.” And this is why our company is called Rise
_Science_. We couple peer-reviewed science with constant user feedback to
guide our product development.

It’s taken a decade of rigorous work and research to get here. We’ve invested
millions of dollars (from the investors behind Peloton, Fitbit, Spotify,
Facebook, and Twitter). We’ve studied tens of thousands of users – high
schoolers to pro athletes, working parents to retirees - to design and build
scientifically robust algorithms to help people live the best lives possible.

If you want to see it for yourself, [start a free
trial](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/rise-track-sleep-circadian/id1453884781).

### The work we do next will determine our success

While we’re not an established category with millions of paid subscribers,
you’re not starting from scratch. Our product works well, we have tens of
thousands of happy customers, and a scalable path to impact more people. We
didn’t get lucky on product. We got here with a human-centered product team.
But **the work we do next** , together, will ultimately determine how many
lives we can improve and write the Rise Science story. We now need to take
what we've done, scale it 100x, while continuously improving the experience
for our future million subscribers. At the scale we're running, even a 1%
improvement in our models will translate to improving the lives of an
additional 10,000 people.

### Some challenges of working at Rise Science and this role

  * You'll be the first full-time person working on our algorithms and data stack. While we have many of the key ingredients in place, you'll be expected to help stand up our processes and systems. _If you don't enjoy starting from scratch and prefer going into a team where most things are in place, this role may not be the best fit._
  * You'll be working with both statistical as well as heuristic-based algorithms. Part of your job will be deciding which techniques to use to make our product better. _If you only like working with very specific techniques (say only deep learning), this may not be the job for you._
  * Our core algorithms are both server-side in python and client-side in Swift or Kotlin. _While we don't expect you to be proficient in new languages, if you don't like learning new languages and toolkits, you may not enjoy it here._
  * The academic community is very active in the fields of sleep and chronobiology. That means we'll need you to be able to read new research and use new findings as part of your models. That could mean adding new inputs to existing models, or using new techniques and implementations. _If you're not comfortable reading academic papers and translating them into working code, systems and products, it will be extra challenging to solve these problems._

### A few of the example projects that we expect you to work and thrive on
during your first few months with us:

  * Lead a key project to improve our sleep detection algorithms. Work closely with our heads of product and design to design how we communicate changes and gather real-time user feedback on the improvements.
  * Develop and release an improvement to our circadian algorithm within our python backend, based on some of the latest published studies we've been following.
  * Implement a reliable and robust closed-loop system to measure and improve our core model accuracy.
  * Work closely with the product team and founders to have good predictors for a user's success with RISE so we can better prioritize our roadmap.
  * Roll out a better outlier-detection system to our client-side algorithms in Swift that significantly improves the experience for new subscribers.

While we're not dogmatic about tools, we use a variety of different ones to
power our product and company. Knowledge and experience in many of these will
be handy, but it is not expected you have deep expertise in all of them. As
the first hire to our data & algorithms function, you will have autonomy and
our trust to add new tools and techniques to our repertoire.

  * Python+Django for production web code as well as deep integrations with the numpy and pandas data stack.
  * Majority of computations built using numpy and pandas.
  * Postgres as our main datastore. Firestore for syncing data to our mobile app and offline access. Snowflake as our data warehouse.
  * Jupyter notebooks for data exploration and algorithm development.
  * Redis for caching and as a swiss-army for non-durable data needs.
  * Celery plus a home grown job-queue system on top of RabbitMQ.
  * Swift for our iOS client-side and data processing and algorithms.
  * React Native powers our core mobile app.
  * AWS Lambda for a few infinitely scalable entry points.

## Some reasons you might like working with us

  * **You'll do work most days that will directly improve people's lives**. The code you write and the systems you keep up will help more people become better at sleeping. Each PR, deploy, and performance improvement will have a direct impact on our users. Each member of the team shares this daily mission. What you do each day directly contributes to the health, happiness, productivity, and longevity of the world.
  * We don't chase shiny new technology. Most of the time, [choosing boring technology is better.](http://boringtechnology.club/) But we aren't luddites. Occasionally it makes sense to adopt new things quickly, like we did with React Native, Swift, ECS and Lambda.
  * More than anything else, we realize that [life is short](http://paulgraham.com/vb.html). So even though we're solving an unthinkably large problem, **taking time for yourself and your family is essential**. Without it, we don't believe you can live your best life and do your life's work. And of course, we'll get your sleep in order 😉
  * One of our core values is growth. That means every week, we'll talk about how we can help you grow. What skills, experiences, people can **help you get to your next career goal**. For this role to be amazing, it has to be amazing for you.
  * You'll shape the long term direction and vision of our technology. Not just ship code, but own our direction and architecture. You will have the freedom to adopt technologies that you like.
  * You'll work alongside product, design, marketing, and customer success. You'll have opportunity to contribute meaningfully across the company (you'll be employee 9 or 10).
  * You won't have to convince anyone of the value of testing. We have extensive suites, but also know we have work to do here.

### Compensation?

We target 50th percentile for cash and 75th percentile for equity for
companies of our size and capital raised. I'll share up to date market data
with you so we're seeing the same data. We'll dig into specifics as soon as
it's a clear fit on both sides.

### Location?

US-friendly hours are strongly preferred. We’re a 100% distributed team (most
in Eastern and Central time in the US) and we keep our meetings to an absolute
minimum. However, we often work semi-synchronously so it’s important to have
some solid workday overlap.

## If this sound interesting, let's talk.

Instead of a cover letter, email me at
**[leon@risescience.com](mailto:leon@risescience.com)** | **Subject: 'Rise
Science Data & Algorithms Lead**' and include your answers to the questions
below. We value great writing and clear thinking. So take the time you need
but the answers don't need to be long. For guardrails, try not to spend more
than an hour.

  1. Tell me why this opportunity feels right to you. What did you respond to in the letter? What surprised/excited you about the opportunity?
  2. What would your most recent manager rate you 1-10? Why?
  3. Can you tell me what you like about your current role? And what do you find drains your energy there?
  4. Tell me about a time when you implemented a new algorithm or model from scratch? What was the timeline like? What were some of the challenges?
  5. Tell me about a time that you helped improve an existing rule-based system to an ML or statistical model?
  6. Have you ever worked with collecting, analyzing, and modeling time-series data? What are some of the unique challenges?
  7. Have you ever rolled out an algorithm or model to production and iterated on improvements? How did you approach the iterative process for continuous improvement on the performance, especially under new production data streams?
  8. For which kind of problems and data domains would you use Bayesian approaches vs more traditional probabilistic methods?
  9. Tell me about a time you were limited in your modeling and algorithm development because your dataset was limited, unstructured, or lacked definition. How did you go about working with other folks in your larger org to get through this challenge?

### **What to expect next**

I'll hand review what you send. I'll respond with either "I don't think the
fit is here" or that we should move forward in process. To make sure this is
an amazing fit for you here's what the rest of process looks like assuming
there's some fit:

  1. We talk on the phone for 30 minutes and I ask questions about your past work and how it relates to what you'd be doing at Rise Science.

  2. You'll work on a take-home realistic challenge that should take you no more than 5 hours. This is designed to be similar in nature to the work you'll do here at Rise Science.

  3. A deep dive with a few of your potential future team members on both technical areas and non-technical areas. It would be 3-4 sessions over zoom. For example: walk through a modeling problem with our CTO, present an exploratory data analysis project to the team, or pair program with our backend lead to simulate the implementation of a production-ready model. You'll also be spending some time with our CEO learning about company culture, our vision, and product development beliefs.

