Senior Data Scientist

Senior Data Scientist

Onsite at Woodlawn, MD f2f interview

Visa any

Years of experience must 14+ years

Candidates need to have excellent communication skills. This will be 5 days working from SSA HQ, so candidates should be local and ready to interview immediately.

Key Required Skills:

•            Strong practical experience with Natural Language Processing (NLP), Text Processing, and Information Extraction concepts including Named Entity Recognition, Blocking and Indexing, String Distance Metrics, TF-IDF/Cosine Similarity, Phonetics Encoding, Address Standardization

•            Solid Python, Regex, and SQL experience

•            Excellent Communication skills

Position Description:

•            Develop Analytics Solutions: Design, implement, and maintain advanced data processing and entity resolution pipelines using Python and SQL on enterprise data platforms.

•            Data Hygiene & Management: Clean, transform, and manage large-scale datasets from diverse, complex sources, ensuring absolute data integrity, reliability, and security.

•            Performance Optimization: Optimize complex SQL queries and database operations to ensure efficient data access, processing, and scalability.

•            Engineering Standards: Actively participate in code reviews, enforce version control, and uphold best practices for code quality, reproducibility, and data privacy.

•            End-to-End Delivery: Support data validation, testing, deployment, and post-implementation monitoring in a fast-paced environment.

Skills Requirements:

Foundation for Success (Basic Qualifications)

•            Bachelor’s degree in Statistics, Applied Mathematics, Computer Science, or Information Science with experience in NLP, Text Processing, Information Extraction, Python, SQL, Regex and specialized libraries/frameworks.

•            Overall 10+ years’ experience in IT industry

Factors To Help You Shine (Required Skills)

Selected candidate must be able to obtain and maintain a public trust clearance

Selected candidate must be willing to work on-site in Woodlawn, MD 5 days a week

Master's and 10+ years of experience, Bachelor's and 12+ years of experience or 18+ years in lieu of a degree

•            Strong practical experience with Natural Language Processing (NLP), Text Processing, and Information Extraction including:

o            Practical knowledge of Named Entity Recognition and Address Standardization to extract and clean unstructured text data.

o            Deep understanding of data matching strategies, including Blocking and Indexing, String Distance Metrics, and Phonetic Encoding.

o            Experience applying TD-IDF and Cosine Similarity for text comparisons and information retrieval.

•            Strong Python development skills for building analytics solutions and manipulating data.

•            Advanced SQL proficiency for complex data querying, optimization, and database operations.

•            Practical experience using Regex for advanced text processing, data cleansing, and pattern matching.

•            Familiarity with specialized libraries and frameworks including:

o            Linkage libraries such as Splink / FastLink, Dedupe, or recordlinkage

o            Core Python data science libraries, specifically spaCy for NLP tasks and Scikit-Learn for general machine learning and clustering

•            Familiarity with code reviews, version control, and maintaining data security and reproducibility standards.

•            Excellent communication skills.

How To Stand Out From The Crowd (Desired Skills)

•            Prior experience delivering IT or data initiatives within federal, state, or local government environments

•            Proven ability to operate independently, take ownership of data pipeline architectures, and drive projects from data discovery through to post-implementation.

•            Experience retrieving, migrating, and manipulating data from legacy and distributed systems, including PostgreSQL, DB2, Oracle, SQL Server, and Hadoop, as well as unstructured flat files.

•            Experience utilizing Jenkins to automate continuous integration, testing, and deployment (CI/CD) for data validation pipelines.

•            Experience with pipeline automation tools to schedule and monitor complex data cleansing jobs.

•            Strong ability to translate complex algorithmic decisions (such as probabilistic match thresholds) into clear business logic for executive leadership and non-technical stakeholders.

•            Excellent problem-solving skills and proven verbal/written communication skills when collaborating across cross-functional teams.