Onsite Principal Data Scientist: Wind & Weather Forecasting

Vitaver & Associates, Inc; Juno Beach (FL); On-site; USD 140,000 - 200,000; Part time

Job summary

Vitaver & Associates, Inc is seeking a Principal Data Scientist to work onsite in Juno Beach, FL. This contract role requires relocating candidates and full-time client-site presence.

The ideal candidate will lead forecasting model development across wind, solar, and load using weather data, NWP forecasts, and telemetry. You will implement production pipelines, backtesting, and model validation, with strong AWS and Python tooling.

Qualifications

• Experience with developing and deploying forecasting, time-series, or predictive models.
• Experience with feature engineering.
• Experience with regression and time-series methods.
• Experience with gradient boosting.
• Experience with ensemble forecasting.
• Experience with probabilistic or quantile forecasting.
• Experience with model validation and backtesting.
• Experience with integrating and analyzing weather APIs, NWP forecasts, SCADA/telemetry, databases, and external data feeds.
• Experience with SQL and data analysis.
• Experience transitioning models from R&D to production workflows.
• Experience with AWS (EC2, S3, Lambda, ECS, Step Functions, CloudWatch, SageMaker).
• Experience with Git and version control.
• Experience with testing and reproducible software-development practices.

Responsibilities

• Develop and enhance wind, solar, and load forecasting models from research and backtesting through production implementation.
• Build forecasting approaches using weather and NWP forecasts, historical generation and load, SCADA and operational telemetry, persistence and statistical baselines, gradient boosting, and ensemble/probabilistic methods.
• Perform feature engineering, model selection, optimization, and validation, and develop backtesting and benchmarking processes across sites, horizons, seasons, and operating conditions.
• Analyze multiple weather and NWP providers for accuracy, reliability, coverage, latency, available variables, and forecast horizon, and develop approaches for provider blending, weighting, bias correction, and fallback.
• Investigate forecast errors to determine sources and perform root-cause analysis of significant misses.
• Monitor forecast performance using MAE, RMSE, normalized error, bias, and forecast skill; implement logging, alerts, error handling, and recovery procedures.
• Develop data connectors and pipelines for weather, telemetry, historical data, load, and operational data; support scalable batch and near-real-time forecasting workflows.

Skills

Python

pandas

NumPy

scikit-learn

statsmodels

LightGBM

XGBoost

forecasting

feature engineering

time-series

regression

gradient boosting

ensemble forecasting

probabilistic forecasting

model validation

backtesting

SQL

AWS

SageMaker

Git

testing practices

reproducible software

Tools

EC2

S3

Lambda

ECS

Step Functions

CloudWatch

SageMaker

Git

Streamlit

Plotly

Job description

Vitaver & Associates, Inc is seeking a Principal Data Scientist to work onsite in Juno Beach, FL. This contract role requires relocating candidates and full-time client-site presence.

The ideal candidate will lead forecasting model development across wind, solar, and load using weather data, NWP forecasts, and telemetry. You will implement production pipelines, backtesting, and model validation, with strong AWS and Python tooling.