Senior Data Scientist

ACT is a nonprofit organization helping people achieve educational and workplace success.  Our programs are designed to boost lifelong learning in schools and workplaces around the world. Whether it’s guiding students along their learning paths, enabling companies to develop their workforce, fostering parent, teacher, and counselor understanding of student progress, guiding job seekers toward career success, or informing policymakers about education and workforce issues. ACT is passionate about making a difference in all we do.  Learn more about working at ACT at act.org!

Are you passionate about using data science methods and educational data mining techniques to address critical issues in education, especially those facilitated through educational technology?  If this sounds intriguing, then we’d like to talk to you about a role within the data science group in ACTnext, the innovation organization within ACT.

The Senior Data Scientist has primary responsibility for conducting data science projects with applications in educational data mining and learning analytics.

Typical work-related activities include:

• Deliver data science projects from beginning to end, including understanding the business need, aggregating data, exploring data, building & validating predictive models, and deploying completed models to deliver business impact to the organization.
• Provide technical documentation of data science projects including minimally presentations, technical reports, and code documentation.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with product managers, assessment designers, psychometricians, research scientists, engineers and analysts.
• Provide data science industry leadership and scholarly contributions through research, publications, presentations and partnerships.
• Contribute to a culture of high achievement, industry leadership, innovation, and accountability.

Education: 

• Masters’ degree in data science, computational linguistics, data mining, machine learning, statistics, computer science, operations research, engineering, mathematics or related field required
• PhD degree preferred
• Or an equivalent combination of education and experience from which comparable knowledge and abilities can be acquired

Experience:

• 5 years of demonstrated success conducting predictive modeling, data science, and analysis projects required
• Experience using Python and R required
• Knowledge of and experience writing SQL queries
• Work experience should include a solid combination of any of the following:
  • Domain experience in ed tech, education, publishing or assessment industries
  • Experience with clickstream and/or streaming data for behavioral analysis
  • Experience conducting automated feature extraction from large dimensional data sets
  • Experience building and evaluating machine learning and deep learning models
  • Research expertise and scholarly contributions in data science
  • Experience using tools for natural language processing
  • Experience using Zepplin or Jupyter notebooks
  • Experience working with big data tools such as Hadoop, Spark, Map/Reduce, and NoSQL databases
  • Experience handling datasets exceeding 250GB

Knowledge, Skills and Abilities:

• Excellent oral and written communication skills
• Innovative thinker and thought leader
• Exceptional collaborator and team member
• Strong analytical skills and decision making abilities
• Demonstrated willingness to both teach others and learn new techniques
• Agile mindset
• Ability to be successful in a fast paced environment, prioritizing and managing multiple complex projects