Senior Data Scientist

Position Title: Senior Data Scientist 13+ yrs ||F2F interview Woodlawn MD Visa : USC,GC,H1B Vendor Notes Candidates need to have excellent communication skills. This will be 5 days working from SSA HQ, so candidates should be local and ready to interview immediately. Key Required Skills: Strong practical experience with Natural Language Processing (NLP), Text Processing, and Information Extraction concepts including Named Entity Recognition, Blocking and Indexing, String Distance Metrics, TF-IDF/Cosine Similarity, Phonetics Encoding, Address Standardization Solid Python, Regex, and SQL experience Excellent Communication skills Position Description: • Develop Analytics Solutions: Design, implement, and maintain advanced data processing and entity resolution pipelines using Python and SQL on enterprise data platforms. • Data Hygiene & Management: Clean, transform, and manage large-scale datasets from diverse, complex sources, ensuring absolute data integrity, reliability, and security. • Performance Optimization: Optimize complex SQL queries and database operations to ensure efficient data access, processing, and scalability. • Engineering Standards: Actively participate in code reviews, enforce version control, and uphold best practices for code quality, reproducibility, and data privacy. • End-to-End Delivery: Support data validation, testing, deployment, and post-implementation monitoring in a fast-paced environment. Skills Requirements: • Foundation for Success (Basic Qualifications) • Bachelor’s degree in Statistics, Applied Mathematics, Computer Science, or Information Science with experience in NLP, Text Processing, Information Extraction, Python, SQL, Regex and specialized libraries/frameworks. • Overall 10+ years’ experience in IT industry Factors To Help You Shine (Required Skills) • Selected candidate must be able to obtain and maintain a public trust clearance • Selected candidate must be willing to work on-site in Woodlawn, MD 5 days a week • Master's and 10+ years of experience, Bachelor's and 12+ years of experience or 18+ years in lieu of a degree • Strong practical experience with Natural Language Processing (NLP), Text Processing, and Information Extraction including: • Practical knowledge of Named Entity Recognition and Address Standardization to extract and clean unstructured text data. • Deep understanding of data matching strategies, including Blocking and Indexing, String Distance Metrics, and Phonetic Encoding. • Experience applying TD-IDF and Cosine Similarity for text comparisons and information retrieval. • Strong Python development skills for building analytics solutions and manipulating data. • Advanced SQL proficiency for complex data querying, optimization, and database operations. • Practical experience using Regex for advanced text processing, data cleansing, and pattern matching. • Familiarity with specialized libraries and frameworks including: • Linkage libraries such as Splink / FastLink, Dedupe, or recordlinkage • Core Python data science libraries, specifically spaCy for NLP tasks and Scikit-Learn for general machine learning and clustering • Familiarity with code reviews, version control, and maintaining data security and reproducibility standards. • Excellent communication skills. How To Stand Out From The Crowd (Desired Skills) • Prior experience delivering IT or data initiatives within federal, state, or local government environments • Proven ability to operate independently, take ownership of data pipeline architectures, and drive projects from data discovery through to post-implementation. • Experience retrieving, migrating, and manipulating data from legacy and distributed systems, including PostgreSQL, DB2, Oracle, SQL Server, and Hadoop, as well as unstructured flat files. • Experience utilizing Jenkins to automate continuous integration, testing, and deployment (CI/CD) for data validation pipelines. • Experience with pipeline automation tools to schedule and monitor complex data cleansing jobs. • Strong ability to translate complex algorithmic decisions (such as probabilistic match thresholds) into clear business logic for executive leadership and non-technical stakeholders. • Excellent problem-solving skills and proven verbal/written communication skills when collaborating across cross-functional teams.