Data Scientist

My client is a prestigious government organisation, responsible for collecting and publishing statistics related to the economy, population and society at national, regional and local levels.

The purpose of this position is to manipulate, engineer, model and analyse data and/or data processes to underpin Data Architecture and support internal and external users.

This position is an initial 6-month contract (full time, 37 hours per week, flexi-time), which has the possibility of transitioning into a permanent position.

The position is a hybrid role (1-2 days per week in office), and the successful candidate can be based from one of four office locations - Newport, Titchfield (Hampshire), Darlington, or Edinburgh.

Key Responsibilities

• Work with policy and operations teams to understand where data science can add value.
• Support strategic and operational decision making.
• Source, access, manipulate and engineer data processes with data that typically have characteristics of volume, velocity and variety, or both
• Build credible statistical models from the data and use best coding practices to generate reproducible work.
• May draw on other technical and analytical standards from across government and industry.
• Adhere to the data science ethics framework.
• Be open minded and demonstrate strong intellectual curiosity.
• Have an interdisciplinary focus, using techniques and knowledge from across the scientific spectrum.
• Explore and visualise the data to present the 'story’ of the data in a meaningful way, and to a range of technical and non-technical audiences.
• Use an evolving range of data analysis tools and techniques, including open source, some of which must be learnt quickly.
• Continuously seek to expand a range of technical skills in addition to their leadership and communications development.

Data scientists:

• Have recognised technical ability in several data science specialisms and provide detailed technical advice on their area of expertise.
• Promote and present data science work both within and outside of the organisation.
• Engage with stakeholders and champion the value of data science work.
• Line manage and mentor junior data scientists
• Manage small project teams

Skills Required:

• Applied maths, statistics and scientific practices
• Data engineering and manipulation
• Data science innovation
• Developing data science capability
• Domain expertise: Understands the context of the business, its processes, data and priorities
• Programming and build (data science): Uses a range of coding practices to build scalable data products that can be used by strategic or operational users