Data Scientist

Job Description

The Center for Data Science at RTI International, one of the nation’s largest independent, nonprofit scientific research organizations, is seeking a Data Scientist with skills in advanced analytics, modern software development for data science applications, and data visualization to work on projects in the domains of public health, public safety, social science research, sample surveys, engineering, education, and the environment. The successful candidate will be comfortable working with a growing team of RTI data scientists and domain experts to design, prototype, and implement web-based analysis and data visualization platforms across a wide variety of fast-moving projects. Our goal is to solve problems and inform decision-making through innovation, collaboration, and technical expertise.

• Collaborate with a team of data scientists, software developers, visual designers, and subject matter experts to solve end-to-end problems using data science approaches, techniques, and methods
• Participate in activities related to accessing, collecting, cleaning, storing, organizing, and integrating data, and creating data pipelines
• Participate in activities related to descriptive and exploratory analyses, predictive modeling, machine learning, simulations, text analytics, social network analysis, computer vision, and data visualization
• Develop static and interactive data visualizations
• Assist in expanding our data science business: participate in meetings with clients (internal and external), assist in framing projects and designing solutions based on client needs and problems to be solved
• Create internal and publicly available data products and tools
• Communicate results through presentations and reports for clients, internal staff, scientific journals, professional conferences, and contributions to open source projects
• Collaborate with teams in proposal writing
• Participate in professional development and scientific stature efforts

• A bachelor’s degree in computer science, data science, statistics , applied mathematics, engineering, operations research, economics or related quantitative field and a minimum of 3 years of relevant experience or a master’s degree and a minimum of 1 year of relevant experience
• Experience outside of a classroom environment with any of these: predictive modeling, AI, machine learning, forecasting, optimization, text analytics/NLP, computer vision, and simulation modeling
• Strong interpersonal and collaboration skills - strong oral/written communication, and presentation skills as evidenced by publications, blog posts, videos, or cover letter
• Experience with modern open source software used in advanced analytics, software development for data science applications, and data visualization, such as: Python, R, d3.js, or ggplot2
• Experience with SQL
• To qualify, applicants must be legally authorized to work in the United States and should not require now, or in the future, sponsorship for employment visa status

Desired Skills/Experience:

• Experience accessing, extracting, integrating, creating pipelines, and analyzing data from a wide variety of sources (e.g., relational databases, text and unstructured data, sensor data, social media data, image and video data, streaming data).
• Ability to quickly and easily learn new open source software
• An “analytical mindset” for solving problems
• Experience with interactive data visualization methods
• A strong sense of conceptual and visual design and creative problem solving
• Experience navigating and scripting in a Unix command line environment
• Experience with containerization technologies (Docker)
• Familiarity with SQL and NoSQL databases, including any of these: MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, MongoDB, and Neo4j.
• Experience using git for version control, preferably while collaborating in a small team
• Experience in cluster and cloud computing environments
• Familiarity with working in an agile environment
• Subject matter expertise in any of these: public health, criminal and social justice, public safety, education and workforce, survey science, environment, and engineering.