Data Scientist - LIVE SC CLEARANCE REQUIRED

My client are a prestigious government organisation with offices in Newport, South Wales and Fareham, Hampshire.
They are seeking a data scientist for an initial 6 month contract, with strong coding skills who would help to improve the existing statistical method of trade data allocation for complex UK companies. The person would need to quickly develop a full understand of the existing methods, assumptions, and underlying statistical principles.
The role has been deemed inside IR35. £525.00 - £560.00 per day.

The person should have previous experience in managing big data and cloud storage. They should demonstrate the ability to write efficient analytic programs in Python and SQL scripts, understanding functional and object-oriented coding and code sharing within a team. The essential part of the work is statistical analysis of big, multi-dimensional datasets of economic data, ranking and selecting the most significant statistical features, and presenting their findings for audiences with mixed technical background.

Skills and knowledge

Coding

• Python, proficient user. Libraries: pandas, numpy, matplotlib. We need a person who can write their own programs with confidence, observe the best coding practicing for style, structure, and efficiency.
• Spark: PySpark, dataframes, aggregation, window functions, i/o to HDFS; Hive SQL. We need a person who has experience in writing analytic scripts in Spark, preferably PySpark, and who understands the principles of data storage and management in HDFS.
• Experienced in writing programs using functions and methods, structuring their code into modules, and utilise previously built modules.
• Demonstrate good skills in commenting and annotating their scripts.
• Demonstrate the ability to test their code at various levels, awareness of automated unit-testing and continuous integration, and ability to produce synthetic test data.
• The analytical work will be a spin-off of a large production pipeline, so the candidate has to demonstrate previous experience in using such systems, or, ideally, developing elements of them.

Data management

• The candidate should demonstrate the grasp of principle for multiple versions of data outputs for comparison and selection
• They need to show that that can produce analytical outputs and at the same time not to interfere with the live data production.
• Experience in managing data versions, efficient logging and record-keeping.

Analytics

• The key responsibility of the candidate is to find the most significant features of the alternative datasets, so that an informed decision can be made.
• Previous experience in creating statistical summaries of big data, using contemporary visualisation techniques, and strong fundamental background in descriptive statistics.
• Demonstrate previous experience in "drilling down" some selected data outputs and following the entire process of data transformation from the raw files to the outputs.
• A desirable, but non-essential skill is previous experience in mathematical dimensionality reduction methods.
• Experience of working with multi-level hierarchical data trees, and performing grouping and aggregations at various levels of such classifications.
• The candidate needs to know the principles of de-aggregation down the using weights.
• The candidate should know how to estimate the accuracy of their finding, by calculating standard errors and confidence intervals.