Blue Rose Research has a few roles that we’re actively hiring for as we gear up to elect more Democrats in 2026 and advance progressive causes!
A bit about our work:
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For the 2024 US election, we used engineering and data science to advise major progressive organizations on directing hundreds of millions of dollars to the right ads and states.
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We tested thousands of social media videos, ads and talking points in the 2024 election cycle and partnered with orgs across the space to ensure that the most effective messages were deployed from the state legislative level all the way up to the Presidential race, and spanning the issue advocacy space as well.
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We also tracked public opinion to inform overall strategy and make sure that decisionmakers had a more comprehensive understanding of what issues were most important to voters.
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And we’ve built up a technical stack that enables us to keep developing innovative machine learning, statistical, and engineering solutions.
Now as we are looking ahead to 2026, we are hiring for the following positions:
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Data Scientist – Machine Learning (Salary: $130k – $170k)
Our message testing team deploys custom models in Python to estimate the causal treatment effect of videos and messages. Apply if this sounds fun! (It is.)
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Machine Learning Engineer (Salary: $130k – $170k)
Our engineering team uses off-the-shelf and custom fine-tuned LLMs to enhance our traditional modeling pipelines as well as develop new cutting-edge applications. Apply if this sounds fun! (It is.)
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And our overall jobs board will be updated here as additional roles open up
All positions are remote, with optional office time with the team in New York City.
Please circulate and apply!
Reach out with any questions ([email protected]).
I wonder about those “causal treatment effects”.
If they are doing what I think, it could be misleading them way off track and how could they even know? Such problems with the measure of success itself are very insidious.
“For the 2024 US election, we used engineering and data science to advise major progressive organizations on directing hundreds of millions of dollars to the right ads and states.”
Nice job, well done!
On a less humorous note: why am I uncomfortable with this all? When I think of being a social scientist I do not think that they have the right to nudge and steer things, especially things related to elections. It all seems so unscientific and severely questionable to me.
I think it’s one of the reasons I am happy I did not end up in academia, because it sometimes seems to me that I am questioning things that many people there seem to think are perfectly fine. It’s weird to me at times, such as now after reading this post.
Anon:
1. Many factors influence the election. Campaign strategy is relatively unimportant compared to big political trends, the state of the economy, the news media environment, etc. The job of an analytics firm such as Blue Rose is to do better on the margins. They can’t be expected to guarantee a win–especially given that there are analytics teams working on the other side. You might as well say that Nikola Jokić is a crap basketball player because his team didn’t win the championship last year.
2. It’s weird that you consider the above post as some sort of reason not to end up in academia. Shira and her colleagues at Blue Rose did not end up in academia! They’re just like you, working in the non-academic world.
3. Do Shira and her colleagues “have the right to nudge and steer things, especially things related to elections”? Ummm, yeah. Political campaigning is legal, and I would not call it immoral. Elections are consequential and campaigning is going to happen. I think it’s best for it to be done as much out in the open as possible.
4. I don’t see why you think that what they are doing is “unscientific.” It’s as scientific as other activities in the social and behavioral sciences such as commercial advertising and promotion, traffic engineering, prediction of trends in social media, educational testing, personality profiling, evaluation of the efficacy of psychotherapy, etc etc etc. Not as scientific as chemistry and physics, but still scientific in the sense of forming hypotheses, gathering data, testing and modifying theories, etc.
To connect my points 1 and 4 above: If you come into this with the naive belief that a “scientific” campaign should be able to win every election, then, yeah, you’re gonna be disappointed. But I think this represents a misunderstanding on your part about what social science can, or should be able to, do. You might as well call physicists “unscientific” because those poseurs can’t even build a perpetual motion machine, or call biologists “unscientific” because they can’t cure the common cold. In which case, sure, nobody’s a real scientist. Meanwhile we muddle through doing our science as best we can.
“It’s weird that you consider the above post as some sort of reason not to end up in academia. Shira and her colleagues at Blue Rose did not end up in academia! ”
Thank your for this comment. I now think I should have wrote something like “I am glad I did not end up in some place of work where science is used to nudge or steer things or people”.
“They can’t be expected to guarantee a win–especially given that there are analytics teams working on the other side.”
Can you imagine some sort of spy or double-spy scenario in all of this mess? Like, perhaps there is a Red Rose Research firm which is really a Blue Rose Research firm.
I am so disgusted by all of this. But I think that’s why I am not part of science or academia or any other bureaucratic firm or party or society or whatever. It’s all so sad.
Anon:
At this point you’re just letting your imagination run wild. The U.S. has two major political parties which advocate different positions. It makes sense for both parties, as well as candidates and factions within each party, to campaign: to engage in persuasion and mobilization. Yes, there are political actors who lie, cheat, and steal, and I agree that it makes sense to be disgusted by that. I don’t see why the existence of bad actors in the system should elicit disgust among political consultants who are forthright about their position and don’t do these bad things.
You might feel that politics is sad, but politics is going to happen: there are real decisions to be made, and the political process is part of that. You can similarly be disgusted by smoky factories, modern agriculture, etc., but this is how the food is produced that we eat. What I’m saying is: you can make your choice to withdraw from society however much is practical for you. I don’t think that it’s at all sad or disgusting or immoral or whatever that the rest of us do participate in society by building things, selling things, yes, even trying to identify and persuade potential voters.
I usually don’t align with Anonymous (not necessarily all such self-identifiers, but I think this is the same one I am thinking of), but in this case I share some of their sentiments. It is the same issue I have with polling. The entire effort seems aimed at the messaging. Increasingly, I find it hard to see the links between messaging and actions. This is more true for some politicians than others, but I see little accountability for any of the messages. So, designing platforms, messages, and/or targeting efforts seem to be efforts to deceive, if not outright lie, to voters.
I would say these efforts are scientific. They can be complex and of considerable theoretical and applied interest in themselves. But the whole effort seems to exploit the worst of how our political system works. Andrew points out that this is part of our political process, can be used for good as well as evil, and counterbalanced by opposing interests (a loose interpretation of what he said above). I agree with that and also find a retreat from all of it is a personal option but does nothing to change the practices. But I find it sad nonetheless.
Dale:
I don’t know. One way to think of all this campaigning is as an arms race. Given that the other side is campaigning, it’s not much of an option to unilaterally disarm. But the optimal level of campaigning is not zero: I think it’s good that candidates put some effort into persuasion and mobilization. Maybe in the past more of this would have been done by the news media, but there’s not a lot of news media left.
I guess this post and all the ones for Republicans demonstrate how much andrew hates all the horrible side taking in science! :)))
Anon:
As discussed my recent post on the topic, yes, I have a problem with side-taking, with the practice that the literary scholar Michael Bérubé points to as “the existence of an academic subculture in which pledges of allegiance take precedence over intellectual rigor.”
I don’t my hating of side-taking in science and academia is in contradiction with my support with colleagues such as Shira Mitchell who work in politics.
To put it another way, my problem is not with political activism or political professionalism–I think politics is necessary and important!–but with political allegiance being used in place of artistic or scientific judgment. On this point I am in agreement with George Orwell in his classic article about Salvador Dali, as discussed here.
Based on your comment, it seems that you would be happier if I were to exercise a sort of consistency by either being a pure hack and judging everything on political standards or being entirely politically detached and opposing all work in politics. Neither of those options makes sense to me. I think it should be possible–indeed, I think it’s important–for there to be different spheres of political, artistic, and scientific effort and evaluation. The different spheres overlap, for sure: it’s no coincidence Trofim Lysenko resorted to sordid political manipulation in order to advance bad science, it didn’t help the Nazis that they drove many of the best scientists in Europe into exile, etc. In doing their work in politics, it should serve Shira and her team well to think scientifically and to evaluate their hypotheses based on reality rather than on what they want to be true.
On a lighter note, David Shor (from Blue Rose) recently did a podcast with Ezra Klein about some interesting old and new voting trends. If you listen to it, or better yet watch it (https://youtu.be/Sx0J7dIlL7c?feature=shared), I think you’d agree that first and foremost, David / Blue Rose is trying to understand what’s going on and only then use it to suggest how to win the next set of elections. I don’t think there is anything dishonest or even cringy about that.
I applied for the position after listening to the podcast Ezra Klein did with David Shor. I also read some of the analysis posts/reports from Blue Rose Research. I am extremely interested in the work that the team is doing, especially in the current political situation. I hope that we can connect soon.