Tropical Cyclone SME

Stand Insurance•San Francisco, CA

2d•$170,000 - $220,000

About The Position

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.

Requirements

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.
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.

Nice To Haves

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.

Responsibilities

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.