OR Specialist

Job Description:

Work with OR&AA team members and IT partners to gather requirements, ask questions, and influence our product and business unit teams to deliver high value/impact features to our products.
Day-to-day:

Works on the mathematical optimization model at the heart of a task assignment model adhering to some complex work rules

• Formulate and maintain the MIP

• Translate real business rules into formulation with planners

• Drive the model through the FICO Xpress Java API, generate/inspect .lp files and solver logs.

• Tune the solver; mip-gap, mip-abs-gap, threads, random seed, determinism; reason about branch-and-bound performance and runtime.

• Keep the model solver-agnostic behind the Linear Expression / Linear Constraint / Sense / Sign abstraction so it stays testable and portable.

• Validate & benchmark solutions

• Analyze data stored in Azure ADLS to debug the model and find issues; mine input/output datasets and solver logs to surface data-quality and in feasibility problems, derive insights, diagnose root causes, and resolve modeling bugs (e.g., bad defaults, constraint conflicts).

• Build and maintain the Streamlit dashboard (Python) that visualizes optimizer solutions - code and ship changes directly.

• Work fluently with AI coding agents (Claude / Copilot / similar) to prototype and change models, scripts, and the dashboard fast without lowering the bar on correctness or code quality.

• Partner closely as a team player with the Java engineer to product ionize the model and with planners/SMEs to capture and verify rules; document assumptions and limitations.

Top 3 Mandatory Skills and Experience (EX: education, software skills, licenses or certifications, etc.):
1. Mixed-Integer Programming (MIP) modeling; formulating real-world business rules as decision variables, linear constraints, and objectives; LP/IP theory; branch-and-bound intuition.
2. Commercial solver experience; FICO Xpress (strongly preferred) or Gurobi/CPLEX/OR-Tools/Hexaly, including solver tuning (gaps, threads, seeds, determinism) and reading solver logs /.lp files.
3. Programming to implement model & visualize model solutions;
Java (the model lives in Java behind a solver abstraction);
Python (incl. Streamlit for the dashboard); able to code and ship changes in both programming languages.
Also required: comfortable using AI coding agents (Claude / Copilot) for fast changes; high coding standards; a collaborative team player (open to ideas/feedback, no solo work); a fast learner.
(

Education:

MS/PhD in OR / IE / Applied Math / CS-optimization or equivalent.)
Nice to Have Skills and Experience (preferred but not required):
Java 21 / Spring Boot familiarity; clean/hexagonal model design (ports & adapters); TDD (JUnit
5) for optimization models (LP-file integration tests); scheduling/assignment/routing problem experience; heuristics/meta heuristics/CP as complements to MIP; data analysis & debugging; mining datasets (incl. Azure ADLS) and solver logs to find issues and derive insights; data wrangling (CSV/Excel/SQL);
Git/Git Hub, MongoDB Compass, Maven, Docker; aviation / MRO domain.

Describe a great candidate that you are looking for and what skills and experience they will have: A hands-on optimization scientist who has shipped MIP models into production, not just notebooks. They can sit with a maintenance planner, extract fuzzy operational rules, and turn them into correct, well-scoped linear constraints then make the model solve fast enough to be useful (gap/seed/thread tuning, reformulation, branch-and-bound reasoning).

They write maintainable, tested code behind a solver-agnostic abstraction, validate feasibility rigorously, and communicate trade-offs (objective design, soft vs hard constraints, default-value handling) to both engineers and business stakeholders. Genuine FICO Xpress (or Gurobi/CPLEX) depth is the rare, critical differentiator. They hold high standards for their code, are a collaborative team player (open to ideas and feedback, no solo work), use AI coding agents (Claude / Copilot) to iterate quickly, comfortably build/change a Streamlit dashboard, and are a fast learner.

Perform analysis and derive insights…