DATA SCIENTIST

Full Job Description

U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Office of Inspector General's (OIG) Office of Analytics and Innovation (OAI) is seeking a data scientist to join our creative, multidisciplinary team.

OAI's mission is to empower OIG to leverage data and analytics proactively to promote efficiency, effectiveness, and transparency.

OAI deploys data analysis; data visualization; and statistical sampling, projection, modeling, and forecasting to identify fraud, waste, and abuse in USDA programs and operations.

Applicants must meet all qualifications and eligibility requirements by the closing date of the announcement including time-in-grade restrictions, specialized experience and/or education, as defined below.

BASIC REQUIREMENT: Degree: Successful completion of a full 4-year course of study that led to a bachelor's or higher degree in mathematics, statistics, computer science, data science, or field directly related to the position.

The degree must be in a major field of study that is appropriate for the position. You must submit transcripts that reflect relevant coursework.

OR Combination of Education and Experience: Combination of education and experience which included at least 30 semester hours (or equivalent) in courses equivalent to a major in mathematics, statistics, computer science, data science, or field directly related to the position, plus creditable experience.

You must submit transcripts that reflect relevant coursework. Such education and experience must demonstrate the knowledge, skills, and abilities necessary to do the work of the position.

The quality of the combination of education and experience must be sufficient to demonstrate you possess the knowledge, skills, and abilities required to perform work in the occupation, and is comparable to that normally acquired through the successful completion of a full 4-year course of study with a major in the appropriate field.

In addition to courses in the major and related fields, a typical college degree would have included courses that involved analysis, writing, critical thinking, research, etc.

These courses would have provided an applicant with skills and abilities sufficient to perform progressively more responsible work in the occupation.

Therefore, creditable experience should have demonstrated similarly appropriate skills or abilities needed to perform the work of the occupation.

In addition to the basic requirements described above, the incumbent must have one year of specialized experience equivalent to the GS-14 level in the Federal government and meet time in grade requirements: Time in Grade: Current federal employees applying for a promotion opportunity must meet the time in grade requirement of 52 weeks of service at the next lower grade level in the normal line of progression for the position being filled.

GS-14 Specialized Experience: Must have at least one full-time year (52 weeks) of specialized experience equivalent to the GS-13 grade level in the Federal service (or comparable level of experience from outside the Federal service) performing ALL of the following duties: Developing business solutions by writing code that utilizes open-source machine learning models or code and/or developing custom machine learning models; Applying a variety of data analytic tools and techniques to produce insights from structured or unstructured data; Extract data from disparate sources via SQL, APIs, Cloud Storage, etc., performing complex transformations and feature engineering to load high-integrity datasets into data warehouses for scalable machine learning and analytics.

Communicating with stakeholders to scope business requirements, obtain feedback, and deliver business-relevant solutions within the agreed upon timeframe.

(This experience must be reflected in your resume.) IN DESCRIBING YOUR EXPERIENCE, PLEASE BE CLEAR AND SPECIFIC. WE DO NOT MAKE ASSUMPTIONS REGARDING YOUR EXPERIENCE.

Your resume must support your application responses.

NOTE: To be considered for this position, you must meet all qualification and eligibility requirements for the GS-1560 series set forth in the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Qualification Standards by the closing date of the announcement.

A copy is available at: Data Science Series 1560 Experience refers to paid and unpaid experience, including volunteer work done through National Service programs (e.g., Peace Corps, AmeriCorps) and other organizations (e.g., professional; philanthropic; religious; spiritual; community, student, social).

Volunteer work helps build critical competencies and can provide valuable training and experience that translates directly to paid employment.

You will receive credit for all qualifying experience, including volunteer experience. Major Duties:

• Provides expert design and development of data models and statistical analyses to visualize the impact of alternative strategies and methods.
• Designs and implements custom layouts, algorithms, workflow processes, software, and computer programs for analyzing complex, enterprise-scale data sets used for modeling, data mining, and research purposes.
• Provides expert and authoritative advice to the OAI team, it's customers, and invested stakeholders internal and external to Office of Inspector General.
• As a project lead, ensures status updates and issues are communicated to the team and project manager.
• Writing code (e.g., SQL, R, or Python) that can be used by others to create models, dashboards, and user apps.