Senior Data Scientist

Location: On-site 5 days/week — local candidates only

Clearance: Must be able to obtain and maintain a Public Trust clearance

We are seeking a Senior Data Scientist with deep, hands-on expertise in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Generative AI/LLMs to support a federal data science initiative. The ideal candidate is a true self-starter who can operate independently, translate complex analytic problems into automated data solutions, and communicate findings clearly to both technical teams and executive leadership.

•       Apply hands-on experience in Python, NLP frameworks, SQL, Pandas, NLTK, and spaCy to solve real-world data challenges

•       Analyze trends and transactional data using strong SQL skills

•       Develop, test, and deploy new techniques for NLP understanding

•       Build scalable ML and Generative AI solutions, including Large Language Models (LLMs)

•       Train and optimize NLP/LLM models and build Python-based data pipelines

•       Build cloud-native solutions on AWS

•       Determine the nature of analytic problems, evaluate options, and recommend resolutions

•       Advise on methods and data needed to evaluate complex data problems

•       Collaborate with data collectors and analysts to close gaps on complex monitoring problems

•       Deliver accurate, timely, and sophisticated data analysis

•       Bachelor''s degree in Statistics, Applied Mathematics, Computer Science, or Information Science, with industry experience in Python, NLP frameworks, SQL, Pandas, NLTK, spaCy, data science, and AI/ML/LLM engineering

•       10+ years overall IT industry experience

•       Education/experience combinations accepted: Master''s + 10 years; Bachelor''s + 12 years; or 18 years in lieu of a degree

•       Solid experience with NLP, Python, NLP frameworks, SQL, Pandas, NLTK, and spaCy

•       Experience with Generative AI and LLMs

•       Demonstrated self-starter, able to operate independently

•       Fluency in Python, version control/Git, standard Python packages (Pandas, NumPy, Matplotlib), and ML frameworks

•       Knowledge of TensorFlow, PyTorch, Pandas, scikit-learn, NLTK, AWS EC2 (Azure ML a plus)

•       Experience with scalable data engineering frameworks (e.g., Apache Spark) and orchestration frameworks (e.g., Airflow), and/or semantic search

•       Expert-level data analysis and advanced statistical/ML methods to build, train, test, and evaluate supervised and unsupervised models

•       Experience with ML model deployment and operations (DevOps, MLOps, LLMOps)

•       Experience with NLP/Generative AI libraries (e.g., spaCy, LangChain), text annotation tools, and semantic frameworks

•       Ability to clean and process large volumes of real-world data

•       Experience retrieving/manipulating data from varied sources (DB2, Oracle, SQL Server, Hadoop, flat files)

•       Experience with database management systems (PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, SQL, etc.)

•       Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills; ability to identify risks and propose solutions

•       Excellent written and verbal communication skills across audiences, including executive leadership

•       Prior experience on federal or state government IT projects

•       Industry experience strongly preferred

•       Experience with, or willingness to learn, the Hadoop ecosystem (Spark, Impala, Hive)

•       Experience in an analytical research environment

•       Experience in parallel/GPU processing (CUDA)

•       Experience with Mathematica

•       Experience with markup languages (LaTeX, HTML)

•       Experience with NLP for anomaly detection