Job Title: Senior Data Scientist
Description: Leidos is seeking a Senior Data Scientist to support the Social Security Administration program in implementing bias assessment and mitigation of the agency’s AI use cases in response to the Presidential Executive Orders on AI. The primary goal is to perform additional due diligence to align the legacy AI use cases with SSA’s governance frameworks and provide ongoing support to remediate and improve existing and future AI use cases across SSA. The ideal candidate is passionate about ensuring AI technologies that benefit society while minimizing risks.
Team Culture
Your passion and values might be a good fit for our teams if you answer “yes” to the following questions:
- Are you looking for a company that puts employees first, with a focus on career, flexibility, and well-being?
- Do you enjoy collaborating with colleagues and teammates and believe that the best ideas are fostered in an inclusive environment?
- Are you searching for a team with a strong sense of ownership, urgency, and drive for daily mission success?
- Are you comfortable with proactive outward communication and technical leadership?
- Do you enjoy being a catalyst, solving complex problems, and providing innovative solutions?
- Do you have the flexibility, creativity, and resilience to pivot the mission for success?
- Do you have the courage to make tough ethical decisions with pride, transparency, and respect?
Mentorship & Career Growth
Our teams are dedicated to supporting new team members in an environment that celebrates knowledge sharing and mentorship. Experienced team members will be assigned to new hires for one-on-one mentoring, collaborative reviews, and coaching on customer engagement to help each new hire successfully onboard and demonstrate their skills.
Day to Day Responsibilities
Every position we take is more rewarding when you know the why behind it. Know your work makes a difference to support those who need it most. If your passion is enabling life-changing service to those around you, this is the place for you.
- Provide support to the agency in creating a bias mitigation strategy and examine the Agency’s race and ethnicity (R/E) data for consistency and completeness.
- Assess each of the identified legacy AI-systems for bias and develop the appropriate mitigation approach.
- Collaborate with the customer to remediate or rebuild the model for compliance.
- Compare the legacy and bias-mitigated models for performance, accuracy, and achievement of business objectives.
- Refine and adjust the model until sufficient bias mitigation has been achieved and parity or acceptable performance with the legacy model has been achieved.
- Document findings and methods used, publish code to the repository, and prepare a standard operating procedure for future use cases.
- Present and communicate the intent of AI government policies and Executive Orders.
- Self-starter who can responsibly and independently advance work.
- Work with SSA leadership at all levels and present relevant information.
- All other duties as assigned or directed.
Foundation for Success (Basic Qualifications)
- Bachelor’s degree in Statistics, Applied Mathematics, Computer Science, or Information Science. Experience may be substituted in lieu of degree.
- Minimum 12 years of Data Scientist experience.
- Experience with IBM AI Fairness 360 (AIF360) – preference; Machine Learning (ML); Natural Language Processing (NLP); spaCy and NLTK, as well as language models like BERT and RoBERTa, are desired.
- Knowledge of TensorFlow, PyTorch, scikit-learn, NLTK, Azure ML (optional), Amazon Web Services EC2.
- Proven experience analyzing data, including data quality assessment, data governance, and data protection.
- Familiarity with ethical considerations related to AI, such as fairness, transparency, accountability, and bias mitigation.
- Experience with extracting insights from large datasets to determine bias.
- Excellent analytical skills to identify potential risks and propose effective solutions.
- Clear communication skills to convey complex ethical and technical concepts to various partners.
- Ability to collaborate with cross-functional teams.
- Proven communication in written and verbal formats to various audiences, including executive leadership.
- Demonstrated understanding of challenges in building production-worthy AI systems.
- Proactively seeking guidance, clarification, and feedback.
- Must be able to obtain and maintain a Public Trust. Contract requirement.
- Selected candidate must reside within two (2) hours of SSA Headquarters in Woodlawn, MD.
- Selected candidate must be willing to work on-site at least 3 days a week.
Factors to Help You Shine (Required Skills)
- Strong knowledge of modern JavaScript and experience with ES6+ features.
- Demonstrating an understanding of privacy, data, and model governance activities including AI risks, oversight mechanisms, documentation, development processes.
- Knowledge of the legal and regulatory landscape surrounding AI, including privacy, ethics, liability, and intellectual property laws.
- Proven experience with the full system development lifecycle.
- Demonstrating ability to manage senior stakeholders and client needs.
- Demonstrating ability to contribute to a positive working environment by building relationships with team members.
- Collaborating with teams comprised of technical, data science, and business specialists.
- Collaborating with senior leaders and coordinating roll-out and change management for new processes.
How to Stand Out from the Crowd (Desired Skills)
- Master’s Degree, Advanced Degree in Computer Science, or other quantitative discipline.
- Proven experience in AI ethics, governance, and compliance is a plus.
- Training and/or Certification in AI ethics or related fields is a plus.
At Leidos, we deliver innovative solutions through the efforts of our diverse and talented people who are dedicated to our customers’ success. We empower our teams and contribute to our communities. Everything we do is built on a commitment to do the right thing for our customers, our people, and our community. Our Mission, Vision, and Values guide the way we do business. We are excited for you to take your place in our Leidos Family. Are you a US citizen, US resident, or Visa candidate and think you might fit? We recommend you apply and start the conversation today!
Pay Range: $122,200.00 - $220,900.00
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