Operations Research Intern

Syngenta Seeds is one of the world’s largest developers and producers of seed for farmers, commercial growers, retailers and small seed companies. Syngenta seeds improve the quality and yields of crops. High-quality seeds ensure better and more productive crops, which is why farmers invest in them. Advanced seeds help mitigate risks such as disease and drought and allow farmers to grow food using less land, less water and fewer inputs. Syngenta Seeds brings farmers more vigorous, stronger, resistant plants, including innovative hybrid varieties and biotech crops that can thrive even in challenging growing conditions. Syngenta Seeds is headquartered in the United States.

Operations Research consultant role 

This role is ideal for an operations research student looking for work experience in supporting a business take the next step on its digitization journey in the prescriptive analytics space. 

Syngenta manages various facilities around the globe and especially in EAME (Europe, Africa & Middle East). To improve the efficiency and the wellness of their collaborators, Syngenta is developing various tools to schedule operations and support decision making at a high level.

In our global Operations Research Team, we work on a new set of scheduling methods, able to schedule a large number of tasks and projects. Many of our problems can be categorized as a RCPSP (Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem). The goal of the internship is to study and develop one or more scheduling methods.

Some key activities: 

• Academic research on state-of-the-art methods for scheduling.
• Technical development of optimization methods in the given Syngenta framework.
• Team-work mindset enabling the integration of data sources with technologies across functional boundaries. 
• Communicate with colleagues in other countries and other time zones.
• Collaborate and partner with key stakeholders in both IT and Business Analytics to deliver the next generation optimization solutions.
• Help drive the creation of new models and capabilities that will leapfrog from the traditional approach and accelerate new ways of thinking.

Accountabilities 

• Analyze business requirements and processes and ultimately translate them into the optimization space through use cases, test cases, preparation of training data sets and iterative algorithm development. 
• Implement Optimization methods. Validate designs through a series of purpose-designed testcases. 
• Report on technical issues or questions and make recommendations and collaborate with IT to implement sustainable solutions.
• Constantly be on the lookout for ways to improve the solution, including the end-user interface, discover issues and deliver better value to the stakeholders. 
• Perform academic research of most promising papers to determine good methods to implement.
• Discover new algorithms to solve problems and build programs to automate repetitive work if necessary. 
• Build a benchmark using existing models that can potentially be customized for the project needs through the integration of the required variables.   
• Ability to deploy the model in production giving the stakeholders access to the results in a manner that the output is easily understood by the business.   

Requirements 

• Operations Research - Math, Computer Science, or related area of study
• Strong English written and verbal communication skills. 
• Solid Team player attitude 
• Passion for solution delivery and stakeholder engagement.
• Knowledge of prescriptive, modelling, and development tools and experience working with data
• Ability to write scientific codes with following languages: 
  • Python with Pandas (Preferred and can be used as a substitute to R-language) and corresponding modules (pandas, gurobipy, ortools) 
  • C++
  • Any other prescriptive modeling language 
• Knowledge of operations research algorithms applied to scheduling.
• Problem solving skills with the ability to design optimization pipelines, which may include data ingestion and data delivery.
• Strong analytical capabilities 
• Basic knowledge of SQL and data visualization tools (matlab, ggplot, plotly, qliksense, tableau, etc.) 
• Experience with version control tools such as Git to efficiently track the project from A to Z  
• Problem solving skills with the ability to design optimization algorithms, which may include data Working with cross-functional / organizational / geography people and teams 

Syngenta is an Equal Opportunity Employer and does not discriminate in recruitment, hiring, training,
promotion or any other employment practices for reasons of race, color, religion, gender, national
origin, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital or veteran status, disability, or any other legally
protected status.

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