Skylight is looking to hire a Data Scientist to help the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) modernize its public services by transforming complex data into actionable insights and delivering production-ready analytics and machine learning solutions.
Requirements
- Proven experience designing, validating, and deploying statistical or machine learning models in production with measurable outcomes
- Strong coding and analytical skills (e.g., Python or R, SQL), version control, testing, and reproducible workflows
- Fluency in experiment design and evaluation — choosing appropriate methods, managing drift, and establishing monitoring and retraining approaches
- Understanding of data privacy, security, and compliance needs for sensitive data, and how to integrate controls into delivery
- Experience operationalizing analytics and machine learning on modern cloud platforms (e.g., Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure), including MLOps practices
- Background with natural language processing, large language models, or retrieval‑augmented systems in enterprise settings
- Exposure to regulated environments and governance — for example, Authority to Operate (ATO), the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), the Federal Information Security Modernization Act (FISMA), or Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) contexts
Responsibilities
- Identify high‑value questions, design experiments, and ship production‑ready analytics and machine learning solutions with clear measures of impact
- Build reliable workflows for data prep, feature engineering, evaluation, and monitoring, partnering with data engineers to integrate models into pipelines and applications
- Apply responsible AI practices — privacy, security, fairness, and explainability — and document choices with model cards and decision records
- Translate findings into decisions through narratives, dashboards, and accessible visualizations
- Mentor teammates, write clear documentation, and enable federal partners with playbooks and training so capabilities grow over time
Other
- Ability to communicate complex ideas clearly to technical and non‑technical audiences and to influence decisions across teams
- Commitment to capacity building through mentoring, documentation, and knowledge transfer
- Ability to work successfully in a professional services environment
- Passion for creating better public outcomes through great government services
- You must be legally authorized to work in the U.S. now and in the future without sponsorship.
