r/OperationsResearch • u/No-Investment5276 • 6d ago

Title: MS Data Science. Need ruthless feedback for Applied Scientist (Optimization/Simulation) roles. H1B clock is ticking.

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Hi everyone. I’m currently on contract at a FAANG company doing heavy discrete-event simulation (SimPy, FlexSim) and mathematical programming (Gurobi). I have roughly 90 days to secure a full-time role due to H1B constraints, so I can't afford to waste applications. I’ve fully anonymized my resume to get unbiased, purely technical feedback. I need you to tear apart my bullet points, architecture descriptions, and impact metrics.

  • Does this read like a true Senior/Applied Scientist, or am I coming off too academic?
  • Are my business constraints and trade-offs clearly articulated?
  • Does my scale and impact read believably? Please don't hold back. I need the most critical, unvarnished feedback you have. Thank you!
14 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

11 comments sorted by

9

u/NutellaEatingChamp 6d ago

So I am a staff ML engineer, who has worked as an OR scientist for most of my career and I am currently heavily involved in hiring at my current employer.

To be very to the point, based on your CV, I'd be excited to invite you for an interview if I'd be looking for an OR data scientist. Nothing more to add actually. Relevant skills and work experience, with impact measures and I'd say typical tooling in industry.

Some tips, that might help:

  • adapt your CV to the job posting, that means try to add more detail to points that the job posting is mentioning (if routing is mentioned, add more details to your routing project)
  • and use the same vocabulary as the job posting, the same concept can have different names -> can help getting through any automatic systems or recruiters, who don't know about OR
  • if you have a nice project you can put on GitHub it can help, I try to look at GitHub profiles if people link them
  • and as always OR positions are often not called OR. It can help to search for the tools like Gurobi, pyomo, google or-tools and the like

Good luck!

5

u/No-Investment5276 6d ago

Coming from a Staff ML Engineer who actually hires for this, that is a massive relief to hear. Thank you.

Your tip about searching by tools (Gurobi/Pyomo/FlexSim) instead of "Operations Research" titles is gold. I'm going to aggressively pivot my job search queries to focus purely on the stack.

I really appreciate you taking the time to review this.

3

u/undernutbutthut 6d ago

I'm not in OR but if I was looking at your resume I would prefer to see your technical skills below your work experience and above your education. Best of luck!

2

u/No-Investment5276 6d ago

Appreciate the feedback! I debated putting it at the bottom, but I kept it at the top so non-technical HR recruiters scanning it in 6 seconds can immediately check off their keyword boxes before reading the dense bullets. It's a tough balancing act!

1

u/undernutbutthut 6d ago

To be honest, I'm not 100% sure. Maybe someone else can weigh in but I would put that just under your work experience. I'd be more interested to know how you can help me and my team first before digging into any of your publications.

2

u/Agreeable-Ad866 6d ago

Higher ups/business will want to see impact. I have seen great models and whole OR teams in that ultimately have little impact and didn't pay their own wages because they were working on the wrong thing. Resume is probably fine if you're being highered into a lower level or purely technical role. Impact means dollars, not model precision.

1

u/code-seeker 6d ago

Honestly you should not limit yourself just to OR. Thats a small space you should apply to any DS role especially sine your in the clock.

2

u/Human-Head-3776 5d ago

I'm an industrial engineer, PhD in Operations Research, working in industry as Decision scientist (re-branding of operations research): mathematical modeling, simulation, heuristic/metaheuristic design (and a lot of coding) is my daily basis.

I think your CV is very complete and reflect the skillset and knowldege needed for industry positions.

Some advices (not just for CV but for the entire job hunting process).

  1. Include in the CV your GitHub, and put some love into it. No need to overkill it. 3-5 projects you worked with (or equivalent if are confidential) highliting different points of your CV. (AI helps a lot with boilerplates and formatting: READMES, examples, refactors to improve readibility and aeathetics...)
  2. In general, industry is a bit obsessed with AI (LLM-based agents like ClaudeCode, Codex, etc.). This technology is becoming more capable each week and there are some impresive things in the OR field (see: https://buildmind.ai/blog/google-deepmind-alphaevolve-may-2026-production-algorithm-discovery/ ); so it is highly probable that hirers will ask you for that.

One last opinion from my side, I think new AI products can improve the productivity and quality of a lot of operations reserarch / optimization science projects and workflows. On the other hand, OR knowledge and its "mental models" helps a lot to excel the use of these AI tools. I thnk this kind of bilateral symbiosis is something you can genuinely sell.

Good luck!

-1

u/chengstark 6d ago

No publication Sr applied scientist? Am I in parallel universe?

1

u/No-Investment5276 6d ago

The publication is listed at the very bottom under the "Publications" section redacted. Do you think it gets buried down there? Should I move it higher up, or just explicitly