Tropical Cyclone SME
Stand
Location
San Francisco
Employment Type
Full time
Location Type
On-site
Department
Science & Engineering
Compensation
- $170K – $220K • Offers Equity
About Stand
Stand is a new technology and insurance company revolutionizing how society assesses, mitigates, and adapts to climate risks. Our leadership team has extensive experience in insurance, technology, and climate science: building billions in market value at prior ventures. At Stand, we are rethinking how insurance enables proactive, science-driven resilience.
Existing insurance models often rely on broad exclusions, leaving homeowners without options. At Stand, we leverage advanced deterministic models and cutting-edge analytics to provide personalized risk assessments—helping homeowners secure coverage and take proactive steps toward resilience.
Why Stand Insurance: At Stand, you’ll join a mission-driven team redefining insurance through the lens of climate resilience, building a transformative, data-driven insurance model with real-world impact for homeowners and communities on the front lines of climate change.
Role Summary: On the Applied Science team, we build the physical and probabilistic engines that power Stand’s climate resilience platform. As a Tropical Cyclone Subject Matter Expert (SME), you will own the wind and flood perils end-to-end, from large scale tropical cyclone storm surges and wind fields to localized, property-scale physical interaction simulations.
This is not an academic or advisory role. You will take responsibility for designing, sourcing, validating, and operationalizing wind and flood models that integrate cleanly into production pipelines and support real underwriting decisions.
You will investigate, prototype, and develop simulations to capture global and local scales, and partner closely with our infrastructure and numerical engineers to productize models in our workflows, defining simulation needs, physical assumptions, boundary conditions, and validation standards. While you may work with our numerical experts to deploy and modify specific solver source code—you will be comfortable independently driving the tooling to ready states and retain primary ownership of wind-specific and flood-specific modeling decisions, performance, and credibility.
This position is ideal for someone who thrives in fast-paced environments, creates structure from ambiguous situations, owns outcomes end to end, collaborates effectively across disciplines, and is energized by building from zero to one.
What You’ll Do:
Own wind hazard modeling across scales
Design and operationalize global (large-scale) wind and flood models for tropical cyclones and severe weather events (extending to others perils, e.g., severe convective storms).
Develop or integrate localized (property-scale) wind and flood models capturing terrain, surface features, and building-scale flow effects.
Ensure physical consistency and clean interfaces between global and local models.
Define what “good” looks like for wind and flood modeling
Identify the key physical features global and localized wind and flood models must capture and define required inputs, outputs, and resolution across scales.
Set clear modeling targets aligned with business needs and underwriting use cases.
Drive validation and credibility
Define and assemble validation datasets (damage data, remote sensing, lab/field measurements).
Establish validation metrics and statistical tests to assess both physical realism and business utility.
Own the validation test suite used for ongoing model evaluation and iteration.
Integrate models into production pipelines
Ensure models slot cleanly into Stand’s broader modeling stack, including global-to-local transformations.
Define interface contracts, APIs, and data handoffs.
Support optional integration with structural response models when appropriate.
Communicate clearly and collaborate deeply
Explain modeling decisions, assumptions, tradeoffs, and uncertainty to cross-functional partners.
Work closely with across teams to move models from concept to production.
Core Skills (Must-Haves)
Deep physical intuition for wind and flood behavior across scales, from synoptic or mesoscale systems to building-scale effects.
Experience working with CFD, atmospheric modeling, and their coupling
Demonstrated experience with wind and flood physical hazard modeling, atmospheric modeling, or closely related domains.
Experience working with multi-scale physical models, not just a single resolution or domain.
Strong validation discipline: comfort comparing models against real-world or experimental data and rejecting weak physical explanations.
Ability to own end-to-end modeling workflows, from design through production-ready implementation.
Clear technical communication and a collaborative mindset.
Nice to Have
Exposure to hazard-structural coupling models
Familiarity with probabilistic modeling approaches (e.g., uncertainty modeling, surrogate models, reduced-order methods).
Experience using ML-driven approaches to accelerate or approximate large-scale wind simulations.
Prior experience in an early-stage startup or fast-moving applied science environment.
Non-Negotiable Competencies
Ability to reason about and integrate multiple scales of wind models.
Rigor and skepticism in validation and physical assumptions.
Highly self-motivated, with a “run-through walls to get the problem solved” mentality, self-directed, proactive, and adaptable.
Comfort with ambiguity and open-ended modeling problems.
Ownership mentality — you treat the wind and flood perils as your domain and push it to production-quality standards.
Willingness to collaborate deeply with physics simulation, and engineering partners.
This Role Is Not a Fit If You…
Have only worked on single-scale wind models with no cross-scale integration.
Lack experience validating models against real-world or experimental data.
Prefer purely academic modeling without production constraints.
Resist collaboration or struggle to define clear modeling targets and success criteria.
Compensation:
The annual base salary range for full-time employees in this position is $170,000 to $220,000 + meaningful Equity Grant.
Compensation decisions are dependent on several factors including, but not limited to, an individual’s qualifications, location where the role is to be performed, internal equity, and alignment with market data.
Additional Benefits:
Comprehensive benefits including above-market Health, Dental, Vision
Weekly lunch stipend
Flexible time off
401k plan
Equal Opportunity Employment
Stand is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of protected veteran status, disability, or other legally protected status. We believe that diversity enriches the workplace, and we are committed to growing our team with the most talented and passionate people from every community.
We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals. If you require assistance
Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.
Compensation Range: $170K - $220K