Senior Optical Research Scientist

Who We Are: Gram Games is the studio behind popular titles like 1010!, Six!, Merge Dragons!, and Merge Magic!, with more exciting projects in the pipeline. We are proudly part of the Zynga & Take-Two Interactive family. We do things differently here: we work in small self-managing teams, giving you an incredible amount of ownership, autonomy, and impact.  At Gram, everyone is expected to have a razor-sharp focus on creating a tangible impact on their team, their work environment, and on the overall company strategy. If you are motivated by autonomy, constant improvement, collaboration, and a sense of belonging, this is the place for you. POSITION OVERVIEW: We are seeking a highly skilled and experienced Principal Game Economist to join our team in London. Reporting directly to the Director of Economy and working closely alongside another Lead Economist, you will operate as a centralized expert resource across three different studios. Unlike traditional game economy roles focused on a single title, you will lead economic strategy and systems design on a project basis, supporting various games across our extended portfolio. While this is a high-level Individual Contributor role with no direct reports, your leadership impact will be massive. You will analyze each game, identify key opportunities and challenges, and build sustainable solutions while elevating our internal economy practices. You will establish best practices, develop robust frameworks, and mentor embedded game teams so they can eventually own and manage their economies independently. This role is highly strategic and deeply hands-on: blending advanced research, complex system design, cross-studio collaboration, and technical mentorship. At Gram we embrace a hybrid work environment. Within this role, you would work 2 days per week in our London office and the remaining days at home. WHAT YOU'LL DO: You aren't just working on one game; you are a key economic architect across three studios. You will step into different projects to diagnose economic health, design robust pricing and reward systems, and empower local teams to execute your designs. * Drive Cross-Studio strategy: Serve as the shared expert supporting multiple games across distinct studios. You will take ownership of the economic design phase for targeted projects, identifying gaps and implementing tailored solutions to drive engagement and business performance. * Collaborate at the highest level: Work in tandem with another Lead Economist and report directly to the Director of Economy to align on portfolio-wide strategies, tackle complex systemic challenges, and ensure consistent design standards across all studios. * Mentor and Empower teams: Act as a technical leader and mentor for game-level economy designers and PMs. While you won't have direct reports, you will lead through influence, training internal teams on advanced economic frameworks and ensuring they have the tools to manage their game's economy long-term. * Design and simulate: Leverage your quantitative expertise to build complex predictive models, run simulations, and design A/B tests that validate your design decisions and forecast the impact of new features. * Bridge the gap globally: Drive cross-functional efforts with Product Managers, Data Scientists, and Engineers across different teams and geographies, acting as a technical bridge to ensure seamless execution from concept to live ops. WHAT YOU BRING: * A Bachelor's or Master's degree in Economics, Math, Statistics, or a related quantitative field, paired with a proven track record of designing and optimizing complex game economies at a senior or lead level. * Advanced analytical skills with a "must-have" mastery of Excel. Experience with SQL, R, or Python is a significant advantage for deep-dive research and modeling. * Demonstrated ability to drive strategic initiatives and upskill junior or mid-level talent across multiple studios or departments without formal reporting lines. You excel at matrix leadership and cross-functional collaboration. * A deep-seated interest in Free-to-Play mechanics and a sophisticated understanding of how to balance player experience with sustainable monetization. BONUS POINTS: * Additional background in Monetization strategy to complement your economic expertise. * Experience working on large-scale online, social, or multiplayer games. What We Offer You: * Highly competitive salary * Private medical care * Company bonus scheme * Relocation assistance for those moving to the UK * Awesome onsite chef serving breakfast, lunch, and lots of treats (naughty and nice) * Life insurance and a favorable pension scheme * Healthcare cash plan including dental and optical coverage * Amazing tech to work with and consoles to play and relax with everywhere you look! #LI-Hybrid We are proud to be an equal opportunity employer, which means we are committed to creating and celebrating diverse thoughts, cultures, and backgrounds throughout our organization.  Employment with us is based on substantive ability, objective qualifications, and work ethic – not an individual’s race, creed, color, religion, sex or gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin or ancestry, alienage or citizenship status, physical or mental disability, pregnancy, age, genetic information, veteran status, marital status, status as a victim of domestic violence or sex offenses, reproductive health decision, or any other characteristics protected by applicable law. As an equal opportunity employer, we are committed to providing the necessary support and accommodation to qualified individuals with disabilities, health conditions, or impairments (subject to any local qualifying requirements) to ensure their full participation in the job application or interview process. Please contact us at jobs@gram.gs to request any accommodations or for support related to your application for an open position. Please be aware that Zynga does not conduct job interviews or make job offers over third-party messaging apps such as Telegram, WhatsApp, or others.  Zynga also does not engage in any financial exchanges during the recruitment or onboarding process, and will never ask a candidate for their personal or financial information over an app or other unofficial chat channel.  Any attempt to do so may be the result of a scamp or phishing attack, and you should not engage.  Zynga’s  in-house recruitment team will only contact individuals through their official Company email addresses (i.e., via a zynga.com, take2games.com, naturalmotion.com, smallgiantgames.com, themavens.com, gram.gs email domain).

GROW WITH TREEFERA We are a first-mile intelligence platform, delivering granular visibility into the point of origin in global ag & soft commodity supply chains - where risk, cost, performance and exposure are set. You’ll join a global, cross-functional team that values rigour, curiosity and working close to real-world challenges. Whether your focus is AI, climate, product or operations, you’ll have space to contribute meaningfully and make an impact from day one. If you’re excited by complex problems and want to help reshape how nature is valued in real-world decision-making, we’d love to hear from you. ROLE OVERVIEW Transform satellite, radar, and LiDAR signals into precise intelligence that protects forests and fortifies supply chains. You will develop models ranging from EUDR-compliant plantation mapping, to biomass estimation and forest degradation that accelerate decarbonisation and in turn enable confident, risk-adjusted decisions at global scale. WHO YOU ARE * You take models across the full lifecycle — research, prototyping, validation and productionisation — and you have shipped them in an industry, product or startup setting, not only in research. * You are fluent across the modern Python ML stack — deep learning (CNNs, U-Nets, vision transformers) in PyTorch and classical methods (gradient boosting, random forests) in scikit-learn — and you pick the right approach for the problem. * You work fluently with remote sensing data (optical and SAR) and geospatial Python tooling (rasterio, xarray, geopandas, GDAL and the STAC ecosystem), and you understand the sensor-specific quirks that matter for modelling. * You design validation that benchmarks against reference datasets, quantifies uncertainty and surfaces failure modes — and you can explain modelling choices, uncertainties and trade-offs to scientific and non-scientific stakeholders alike. * You collaborate by default across Science, Engineering and Product, bring domain exposure to deforestation, land-use change, biomass or supply-chain transparency, and have a genuine appetite for AI-assisted development workflows. Desirable requirements (if applicable): * Building on EO foundation models as a downstream substrate — lightweight classifiers, regressors or similarity search on frozen embeddings (e.g. AlphaEarth Foundations, Clay), with fine-tuning or pretraining where the case justifies it. * Multi-modal fusion across optical (Sentinel-2, Landsat), SAR (Sentinel-1, PALSAR) and LiDAR (GEDI, ICESat-2), and time-series modelling for environmental change detection (temporal transformers, sequence or self-supervised approaches). * Familiarity with STAC-based catalogues (Google Earth Engine, Microsoft Planetary Computer, AWS Open Data), AI-assisted development as a core part of your workflow, and working cross-functionally alongside solutions architects, sales and engineering. WHAT THE JOB INVOLVES * Design, train and evaluate models — from gradient boosting to CNNs, U-Nets and vision transformers — for commodity and plantation mapping, land-cover classification, change and disturbance detection, and biomass / canopy-height estimation. * Build embedding-driven workflows on top of EO foundation models — few-shot classifiers, similarity search and downstream regressors. * Design validation strategies that benchmark outputs against plot inventories and third-party reference data, quantify uncertainty and surface failure modes — producing QA artefacts (maps, plots, model cards, error analyses) that internal teams and clients can defend. * Partner with Engineering to take models into scalable, reproducible inference pipelines across millions of plots. * Contribute to a strong research culture across Science, AI and Engineering — reviewed code, shared tooling and active engagement with EO/ML literature. WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE Within 30 days you'll understand where one of our solution domains touches the ground — its data, models and the customers who rely on it. By 60 days you'll be building: an iteration of an existing model or a new MVP. By 90 days it's released, or signed off and on its way — already sharpening the intelligence organisations use to protect forests and de-risk supply chains. By six months you own a domain such as biomass, forest degradation or commodity mapping and are its point of call. Within a year you'll have shipped a next-generation solution, such as reforestation (ARR) monitoring, that moves the needle on climate-positive outcomes. WHO YOU’LL WORK WITH You'll report to Matthew Courtis and partner day-to-day with the wider Science Team, working closely with Engineering and Product. INTERVIEW PROCESS & WHAT TO EXPECT Recruiter screen (30–45 min) Hiring manager interview (45-60 min) Team & skills session (45-60 min) Final cross-functional whiteboard exercise (In person). (60 - 90 min) Accessibility: Tell us if you need adjustments, we’ll accommodate. What you’ll gain at Treefera * Build something that matters - join a high-growth climate-tech company applying AI, satellite data and quantitative modelling to real-world challenges across global supply chains, commodities and carbon. * Work on complex, meaningful problems - develop systems that balance risk, resilience, compliance and sustainability, giving organisations a genuine information advantage at global scale. * Collaborate with exceptional people - work alongside scientists, engineers and operators who are leaders in their fields, combining academic rigour with practical, cross-functional product delivery. * Ship and grow in a high-trust environment - experiment, iterate and take thoughtful risks in a team that values autonomy, creativity and continuous learning. * Develop your craft - dedicated space and time to grow your skills toward mastery, tackling technically demanding challenges that push the boundaries of applied AI and environmental data. * Be rewarded for your impact - competitive compensation, equity options, meaningful benefits, and the opportunity to help shape the future of AI-powered risk and environmental intelligence. Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Bold solutions come from diverse teams. Please refer to our DEI & EEO commitment below. If you need any accommodation during the application process, we’re here to support you. Learn more about how we think and build Many of our engineers, scientists and product leaders share their thinking publicly. Explore the Treefera blog for technical deep dives, research and product perspectives. Privacy notice By applying to Treefera, you consent to the processing of your personal data in line with our Privacy Notice. TREEFERA IS AN EQUAL OPPORTUNITY EMPLOYER. WE BELIEVE THE DIVERSITY OF OUR PEOPLE IS AS VITAL AS THE DIVERSITY OF THE ECOSYSTEMS WE WORK TO PROTECT, AND WE ARE COMMITTED TO BUILDING AN INCLUSIVE WORKPLACE WHERE EVERYONE CAN THRIVE. WE WELCOME APPLICANTS OF ALL BACKGROUNDS IRRESPECTIVE OF RACE, COLOUR, ETHNICITY, NATIONAL ORIGIN, RELIGION, GENDER IDENTITY OR EXPRESSION, SEXUAL ORIENTATION, AGE, DISABILITY, PREGNANCY, OR ANY OTHER CHARACTERISTIC PROTECTED BY APPLICABLE LAW. REASONABLE ACCOMMODATIONS ARE AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST.