Data Scientist I: AI & ML for Social Research

National Opinion Research Center - NORC; Chicago (IL); Hybrid; USD 90,000 - 100,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Dental and vision insurance

Retirement plan

Life & disability insurance

Paid time off & holidays

Parental leave

Tuition assistance

Employee Assistance Program

Job summary

NORC at the University of Chicago is seeking a Data Scientist I to join the Statistics and Data Science department and support a diverse range of research projects.

The Data Scientist I works with statisticians, researchers, software developers, and subject matter experts to develop statistical, data science, and AI-enabled solutions for research, operations, and decision-making. This hybrid role is based in the Chicago Loop with in-office requirements.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in a quantitative field.
• 4 years of relevant experience including graduate research, internships, and applied professional experience.
• Proficiency developing production-quality Python.
• Strong experience with SQL and relational databases.
• Experience developing software, data pipelines, or analytical applications.
• Experience conducting statistical analysis and machine learning using real-world datasets.
• Knowledge of supervised and unsupervised machine learning methods.
• Experience with Git and collaborative development workflows.
• Strong problem-solving and analytical skills.
• Excellent communication and technical writing skills.
• Ability to explain technical concepts to diverse audiences.

Responsibilities

• Apply statistical, computational, and machine learning methods to support survey research, evaluation studies, and other social science research initiatives.
• Establish reproducible, qualityassured analytic workflows; implement version control (Git), environment management, peer code review, automated testing, and validation checks.
• Develop robust data pipelines that integrate, transform, and analyze structured and unstructured data from multiple sources to support research and operational objectives.
• Design and implement data products, dashboards, applications, and automated tools that enable data-driven decision making.
• Apply machine learning, AI, and natural language processing methods and collaborate with multidisciplinary teams to design, evaluate, and deploy AI-enabled analytic applications.
• Write and implement R, and Python programs to extract/manipulate data, link complex datasets, and execute statistical and machine learning analyses.
• Work with relational databases, cloud platforms, and large-scale computing environments to manage and analyze complex datasets efficiently.
• Uphold data disclosure limitation and data privacy best practices; apply statistical disclosure limitation for public releases and restricted-use data.
• Perform other duties as assigned.

Skills

Python programming

SQL

Git

Communication

Statistical analysis

Machine learning

Data pipelines

Reproducible workflows

Analytical problem solving

Technical writing

Explain technical concepts

Education

Bachelor's degree in computational social science, data science, statistics, computer science or a related quantitative field

Tools

Databricks

Spark

Hadoop

Hive

AWS

Azure

GCP

Job description

NORC at the University of Chicago is seeking a Data Scientist I to join the Statistics and Data Science department and support a diverse range of research projects.

The Data Scientist I works with statisticians, researchers, software developers, and subject matter experts to develop statistical, data science, and AI-enabled solutions for research, operations, and decision-making. This hybrid role is based in the Chicago Loop with in-office requirements.