Senior Data Scientist

Senior Data Scientist
Location: Woodlawn, MD — Onsite, 5 days per week
Contract: 6–12 months with possible extension
Employment: W2 Contract
Interview: Face-to-face
Pay: $45–$48/hour W2

We are seeking an experienced Senior Data Scientist for an onsite opportunity in Woodlawn, Maryland. Candidates must be local or within reasonable commuting distance and able to work onsite five days per week.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain advanced data-processing and entity-resolution solutions using Python and SQL.
• Clean, transform, standardize, and manage large datasets from diverse and complex sources.
• Develop text-processing and information-extraction solutions using Natural Language Processing techniques.
• Apply Named Entity Recognition (NER), blocking and indexing, string-distance metrics, TF-IDF, cosine similarity, phonetic encoding, and address-standardization techniques.
• Optimize complex SQL queries and database operations for performance and scalability.
• Support data validation, testing, deployment, and post-implementation monitoring.
• Participate in code reviews, version control, and data-quality, security, and reproducibility practices.
• Work independently and collaborate with technical and business stakeholders.

Required Qualifications

• 10+ years of overall IT/data experience.
• Strong hands-on experience with Natural Language Processing, text processing, and information extraction.
• Strong Python development experience.
• Advanced SQL experience.
• Strong Regex experience for text processing, cleansing, and pattern matching.
• Practical experience with Named Entity Recognition and address standardization.
• Strong understanding of entity-resolution/data-matching techniques including blocking, indexing, string-distance metrics, and phonetic encoding.
• Experience with TF-IDF and cosine similarity for text comparison and information retrieval.
• Experience with Python data-science/NLP libraries such as spaCy and Scikit-learn.
• Experience with record-linkage libraries such as Splink/FastLink, Dedupe, or recordlinkage is strongly preferred.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills.

Education / Experience

• Master’s degree with 10+ years of relevant experience; or
• Bachelor’s degree with 12+ years of relevant experience; or
• Equivalent extensive professional experience.

Preferred

• Experience supporting federal, state, or local government data initiatives.
• Experience with PostgreSQL, DB2, Oracle, SQL Server, Hadoop, or legacy/distributed data environments.
• Jenkins and CI/CD experience.
• Data-pipeline automation and monitoring experience.

The selected candidate must be able to obtain and maintain a Public Trust suitability determination and must be able to work onsite in Woodlawn, MD five days per week.

Applicants must be legally authorized to work in the United States. Employer sponsorship is not available for this position.

Benefits: Health insurance, paid time off (PTO), and paid sick time.