Data Scientist - Innovation & Impact Analytics (Remote)

American Institutes for Research; Chapel Hill (NC); Hybrid; USD 114,000 - 140,000; Full time

Job summary

American Institutes for Research seeks a Data Scientist to support the Project Success and Innovation (PSI) team and the Employment and Economic Opportunity Program (EEOP). You will lead quantitative workflows, establish reproducible analytic environments, manage complex datasets, and translate findings for clients and stakeholders.

Responsibilities cover tool development, documentation, and collaboration with researchers to advance analytics, ML methods, and responsible AI applications within

Qualifications

• Master's or doctoral degree in a quantitative field; coursework in causal inference and statistical modeling.
• Experience with complex survey data and large-scale administrative or longitudinal datasets.
• Experience applying quantitative methods to education, health, or social policy questions.
• Experience with ML/AI methods, including large language models in research.
• Interest in building tools used by others and supporting them.
• Familiarity with data common in applied social research (admin records, longitudinal data, survey data, text).
• Experience with restricted-use or confidential data.
• Prior work building or maintaining code used by others.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain analytic tools, including code libraries, project templates, and pipelines.
• Write documentation, training materials, and onboarding guides for staff with varying technical experience.
• Support project teams adopting new tools and workflows by answering questions, troubleshooting, and relaying recurring problems back to the team.
• Prototype and test new tools and platforms, including ML/AI applications such as large language models.
• Help maintain deployed tools by triaging issues, fixing bugs, and tracking user feedback.
• Contribute to work plans, timelines, and progress tracking for PSI activities, communicating with PSI leadership.
• Conduct quantitative analyses on research and evaluation projects, including causal and non-causal questions.
• Lead analytic components on discrete studies with senior staff support.
• Manage, clean, and quality-assure complex datasets from multiple sources.
• Build and document reproducible analytic workflows and QC procedures.
• Review analytic code from junior staff and support reproducible analysis and documentation.
• Contribute to study design and analytic planning discussions.
• Draft analytic sections of client reports and presentations for non-technical audiences.
• Track deliverables and timelines for analytic tasks and contribute to proposals.

Skills

R/Python

Stata

Git

Github

Quarto/R Markdown/Jupyter

Communication

Technical writing

Education

Master's or PhD in quantitative field

Tools

Git

Github

Jupyter

R

Python

Job description

American Institutes for Research seeks a Data Scientist to support the Project Success and Innovation (PSI) team and the Employment and Economic Opportunity Program (EEOP). You will lead quantitative workflows, establish reproducible analytic environments, manage complex datasets, and translate findings for clients and stakeholders.

Responsibilities cover tool development, documentation, and collaboration with researchers to advance analytics, ML methods, and responsible AI applications within