Remote Data Scientist — AI & R&D for Digital Campaigns

Progressive Data Jobs; United States; Remote; USD 172,000 - 241,000; Part time

Job summary

Priorities USA is seeking a data science contractor to support R&D efforts to prototype our next generation of digital intelligence tools and experiment with new data methods for digital campaigns. This role sits at the intersection of data science and software engineering, demanding strong statistical intuition and rigorous software practices.

The contractor will prototype, evaluate, and implement methods and features for digital practitioners, work with the Senior Director of R&D, and join

Qualifications

• Strong programming skills in SQL and Python.
• Demonstrated ability to apply statistical and data science methods in real-world contexts.
• Strong software engineering habits (version control, code review, testing, documentation).
• Hands-on experience applying LLMs in real projects — e.g., prompt and context engineering, classification or extraction pipelines, evaluation of model outputs, or agentic frameworks.
• Experience working with agentic software development tools (e.g., Cursor, Claude Code, Codex).
• Experience working with GCP (and preferably AWS), including building and maintaining data pipelines.
• Experience using git + GitHub
• Familiarity with cybersecurity best practices
• Strong communication skills and the ability to collaborate across teams with different working styles and levels of technical experience.
• Demonstrated curiosity and self-directed exploration through side projects, prototypes, experiments, or other evidence that you build and try things on your own initiative.
• Experience communicating with diverse groups, working in a multicultural workforce, and bringing a sensitivity and appreciation of cultural differences

Responsibilities

• Explore, prototype, and validate new analytical methods and LLM applications across a range of political, media, and advertising data contexts.
• Build proof-of-concept tools, features, and datasets, and iterate on them based on feedback from digital practitioners.
• Engineer validated methods into modular, sturdy, well-documented pipelines and applications that are ready to graduate into production systems.
• Develop software primarily through agentic development workflows, producing well-specified, reviewable, tested, and documented code.
• Think critically about what data is saying and communicate findings, tradeoffs, and recommendations clearly to technical and non-technical audiences.

Skills

SQL

Python

Statistics

Software engineering

LLMs

Data pipelines

GitHub workflows

Communication

Self-directed learning

Team collaboration

Tools

Cursor

Claude Code

Codex

Git

GitHub

GCP

AWS

Job description

Priorities USA is seeking a data science contractor to support R&D efforts to prototype our next generation of digital intelligence tools and experiment with new data methods for digital campaigns. This role sits at the intersection of data science and software engineering, demanding strong statistical intuition and rigorous software practices.

The contractor will prototype, evaluate, and implement methods and features for digital practitioners, work with the Senior Director of R&D, and join