Senior Data Scientist, NLP/LLM Evaluation & Coding

Ignite IT; Suitland (MD); On-site; USD 140,000 - 175,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

401(k)

401(k) matching

Dental insurance

Flexible spending account

Health insurance

Life insurance

Paid time off

Professional development assistance

Referral program

Tuition reimbursement

Vision insurance

Job summary

Ignite IT is seeking a Senior Data Scientist to advance the U.S. Census Bureau's Autocoder and assess its use across household surveys and demographics projects.

You will lead analytical methods and experimental design for coding survey write-ins, collaborating with engineers, the Model Evaluation Analyst, and government SMEs to translate evidence into practical recommendations. You will establish performance baselines for ACS Autocoder, analyze coding rates and error patterns, and design

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent professional experience in a related field.
• 8+ years in applied data science or statistics with NLP/text classification experience.
• Strong Python and SQL skills and ability to work with large datasets and ML libraries.
• Experience designing experiments and evaluating models with baselines.
• Experience communicating findings to engineers and nontechnical audiences.

Responsibilities

• Establish baselines and evaluation methods for ACS Autocoder and expansions.
• Analyze coding rates, coverage, error patterns, and category results for improvements.
• Design reproducible experiments with samples, comparisons, and controls.
• Compare LLMs, fuzzy matching, dictionaries, rules, and hybrids by quality and cost.
• Assess data readiness and coding taxonomies for additional surveys and fields.
• Collaborate with Government SMEs to refine prompts, preprocessing, and model config.
• Interpret results and document findings, guidance, and best practices.

Skills

Python

SQL

Data analysis

NLP

LLM applications

Experimental design

Statistical methods

Education

Bachelor's degree in data science, statistics, CS, mathematics

8+ years in applied data science or statistics

3+ years with NLP or text classification

Hands-on LLM application experience

Advanced degree (preferred)

Tools

AWS

Job description

Ignite IT is seeking a Senior Data Scientist to advance the U.S. Census Bureau's Autocoder and assess its use across household surveys and demographics projects.

You will lead analytical methods and experimental design for coding survey write-ins, collaborating with engineers, the Model Evaluation Analyst, and government SMEs to translate evidence into practical recommendations. You will establish performance baselines for ACS Autocoder, analyze coding rates and error patterns, and design