Operations Researcher - London, United Kingdom - Wheely

Description

Wheely:

Wheely is on a mission to build the LVMH for luxury services, beginning with a trusted white glove chauffeur and assistant service.

Data, Science and Technology are central to achieving this mission, ensuring appropriate gating and pricing on the consumer demand side, as well as understanding, reducing and optimising for barriers to entry on the labour market supply side.

Discretion is one of Wheely's core values — where people travel, and who they travel with, is at their discretion.

We respect their private life and their actions.

Wheely has in the past refused to hand over requests to share passenger/journey data to governments, and we will continue to honour our commitment.

This has led us to start developing technology in 2020 to put our clients' movements beyond our own reach.


Marketplace:

The Marketplace team is responsible for matching passenger requests with available Chauffeurs. Their areas of responsibility are pricing, dispatching/matching protocols and incentives. Their success criteria are to maximize welfare (i.e. reliability, utilization) and to avoid a known failure mode of ride-hailing marketplaces known as the wild goose chase.


Scientists in the Marketplace:

While there are existing capabilities, including an app with heuristic dispatch capabilities, that have aided with our success so far we now need to deepen our understanding of our marketplace and embed prediction & optimisation throughout it.

We're looking for a talented Operations Researcher with commercial experience to join and formalise our Marketplace optimisation problems, define and implement optimization algorithms, all while working with our product teams to scope optimisation-backed features that are critical to achieving our future ambitions.

This is a unique opportunity for talented, commercially and user oriented scientists to develop core marketplace capabilities in a mature and profitable company with a unique customer base and take on ride hailing.

Strong preference will be given to those who have 2+ years experience in a similar role at another ride hailing company.

What you'll do in the next 12 months (examples, can be modified with input from you):

• Own your role and create your own path: Connect with the team, understand the company goals (e.g. OKRs) and your role; Align with your line manager and team about how you will contribute and any critical dependencies you'll have. Based on what you've learned about Wheely and your understanding of the domain, purpose 1 new OKR and/or 2-3 features/projects that ensure the impact of Science on Marketplace objectives in 202
• Formalise and make widely understood the Wheely Marketplace optimisation problems: Bring your domain experience and/or work with external experts to formalise the 2-3 most important optimisation problems for Wheely to achieve it's 2023 OKRs. Work with the Marketplace team to align the build of the necessary optimisation capabilities to Wheely's OKRs and the Marketplace roadmap. Propose 1 or more system change(s) for the Q2 roadmap that results in an improvement performance in Driver Utilisation by building offline solutions to the newly formalised problems.
• Introduce new optimisation algorithms as needed to achieve scientific control in marketplace metrics: Augment Wheely's driver allocation and dispatch capabilities with optimisation algorithms as needed to be able to make controlled improvements in key marketplace metrics such as Chauffeur Utilisation, Price, Waiting Time, prebook fulfilment, and so on.
• Work collaboratively with engineers to evolve our marketplace Infrastructure: Work with Marketplace engineers to ensure we have the platform needed to develop, test and deploy the optimisation algorithms we need to power our Dispatch and other marketplace capabilities.
• Help pave the way for more scientists. Identify gaps in Science capability based on the challenges you're facing and your past experience (e.g. economists, data scientists, user researchers, operations researchers, ML engineers, etc). Work with your line manager to create a case for hiring those capabilities.

Benefits:

Wheely expects the very best from our people, both on the road and in the office. In return, employees enjoy flexible working hours, stock options and an exceptional range of perks and benefits.

• Competitive salary and equity package
• Medical insurance including dental services
• Life and critical illness insurance
• Relocation and lunch allowance
• Flexible working
• Monthly credit for Wheely journeys if you live in area of Wheely operations
• Allowance for learning and development
• Top notch equipment

Wheely is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.