Position: Quantitative Analyst – Sports Science and Sabermetrics, R&D Group

Location: Seattle

Description:
Driveline Baseball is looking for a highly-skilled quantitative analyst to join our growing Research and Development team in Seattle. Driveline Baseball secures contracts with multiple MLB teams year-round, providing external amateur draft reports, player development assistance, and on-site implementation of our physical products we manufacture and develop in-house. Driveline Baseball also trains hundreds of elite collegiate and professional hitters and pitchers in their three warehouse complexes in Kent, Wash. (20 minutes south of downtown Seattle).

The ideal candidate will have interest in both sports science and sabermetrics, with a desire to broaden their horizons into other fields we are pursuing, such as logistics, manufacturing, and rapid prototyping. Candidates will not be judged based on their formal education background, or lack thereof; the best candidates to come through Driveline Baseball have a varied and colorful history with a portfolio of failed, half-completed, and blocked sports projects of all types. Self-starters, initiative-takers, and those with a healthy skepticism of authority fit in well in the R&D department of Driveline Baseball.

Unlike MLB organizations, at Driveline Baseball the members of the R&D team work directly and regularly with minor and major league players. You will be communicating directly with big leaguers who will depend on your statistical and quantitative reports to improve their training methods and their pitch selection. You will also deal directly with front office executives and will be expected to take a managerial role in directing quantitative interns and organizing third-party vendors within months of joining our team.

This isn’t your average quantitative analyst position where you’d be siloed in the front office and seen but not heard – you’ll be on the lines of battle and you’ll be crushing R code at a standing desk.

Responsibilities:

• Quantitative analysis of a variety of sports data sources to improve player development, performance evaluation, scouting projects, and other initiatives.
• Regular communication with the R&D team, executives, management, college/minor/major league baseball players, MLB/NBA/NFL front offices, and vendors who support our organization.
• Designing tools to lighten the workload of everyone in the organization; working closely with our software development team and senior project manager.
• Data mining private and public data for additional analysis.
• Helping with data architecture and maintenance.
• Taking initiative to expand these fields as you see fit – if it will improve the company, we’ll make the resources available to you.

Qualifications:

• Formal education: None required. High school dropouts to advanced degree holders will be seen as equals, which reflects the company’s structure as well.
• Intermediate to advanced level w/ computer programming and/or software development. Experience with R, Python, and PHP strongly preferred.
• Understanding of statistical modeling, quantitative analysis, and data science methods.
• Full-time salaried and exempt on-site hours (~50 hours per week). This is not a remote position. Limited ability (20-40%) to work from home may be available after the probationary period, but significant facetime with athletes and staff is valued.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience in modeling sports science tasks, like workload tracking, fatigue measurement, or vision training.
• A GitHub open source portfolio, complete with code and documentation of projects – failed and successful.
• Previous experience working in professional or collegiate sports in any capacity.
• Previous experience as an athlete in any collegiate or professional sport.
• Current self-built management of a Statcast/PITCHfx database, sole or shared with others.
• Data visualization skills.
• Web development skills.
• Management skills – this (especially) includes any retail or food operation management.
• Technical writing skills.
• Highly engaged and accomplished gaming skills. High accomplishments in Counter-Strike, League of Legends, Magic: The Gathering, counting blackjack, chess, online/real life poker, or other games.

To Apply:
Please send an email to kyle@drivelinebaseball.com with the subject “Quantitative Analyst Position” and include a cover letter (email body), resume (PDF or link to a sharable non-exclusive Google Document – please, no .doc/.docx files), and answers to the following questions:

• When would you be available to start?
• Where did you discover this position?
• You have all of the resources of Driveline Baseball available to you, including hundreds of athletes who will submit to semi-invasive testing – what would you want to study in the first year? Describe the project and provide an overview of how you would complete it, from dependencies in the organization to final deliverables.
• What is one thing that MLB organizations are not doing that is completely irrational and would make a huge improvement – on the field or off of it? Bonus points for ease of implementation.