Data Scientist

About CRS

Catholic Relief Services is the official international humanitarian agency of the Catholic community in the United States. CRS works to save, protect, and transform lives in need in more than 100 countries, without regard to race, religion or nationality. CRS’ relief and development work is accomplished through programs of emergency response, HIV, health, agriculture, education, microfinance and peacebuilding.

Job Summary

The Data Scientist will lead the development of appropriate data products for CRS’s program and sector teams, in line with industry best practices. They will work as part of a cross-functional team, identifying opportunities to leverage data science within specific programmatic sectors, leading the search and identification of data sources, supporting the preparation of data, and developing and maintaining relevant data products. They also provide technical assistance to project and sector teams in interpreting and using the results of the analyses. The Data Scientist’s expertise, leadership, and influence will be key in determining how effective, adaptive and innovative CRS’ data science practices are across the globe.

Roles and Key Responsibilities

• Contribute to the identification of opportunities to apply data science to specific projects and sectors
• Lead the search and identification of new data sources, the ingestion, preparation, and onboarding of data for operational and programmatic Use Cases
• Engaging with sector teams, review data collected and make decisions on how to transform data, what approaches to apply when analyzing data, and recommendations for data cleansing
• Lead the development of appropriate data products for CRS’s program and sector teams, following industry best practices and through engagement with sector teams
• Lead the maintenance and development of data products for operational and programmatic Use Cases, ensuring both data and models are functioning properly, and cataloged, accessible, and used appropriately
• Share data insights with to sector and project teams and provide technical assistance in interpreting and using results from data analyses.
Contribute to the knowledge management and learning agenda in data science through helping implement conditions for collective learning that ensure the capturing, documenting, and sharing of key successes, promising practices, and lessons learned .

Key Working Relationships:

• Internal – Colleagues within the Data Science Centre of Practice; Members of the ICT4D team; Regional, country, and project staff; data science colleagues; Senior Advisor for data science; Director and Deputy Director for MEAL; Global and Regional MEAL Technical Advisors
• External - peers in other NGOs, data science consultants