Aviation Programmer Analyst

The Position

ATAC has an opening for an Aviation Programmer Analyst. This is a full-time mid-level staff position and is located in the Washington, DC, area. The successful candidate will participate in the development of data processing and reporting tools supporting the analysis of aviation data at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

• Designing and building ML-driven analytical tools that accept user-specified metrics, threshold criteria, and historical time periods, then identify clusters of anomalous NAS performance and explain their root causes.
• Performing regression analysis and feature engineering on large, multi-source aviation datasets.
• Working with FAA stakeholders to develop Python-based capabilities that ingest air traffic performance metrics, apply clustering, regression, and other ML techniques to enable causal analyses and produce explainable outputs that quantify the contribution of each causal factor.
• Using Python, Java, R and/or other languages and tools to create extract, transfer, load (ETL) processes generate metrics, find anomalies, and determine causal factors in aviation data.
• Implementing model-explainability techniques (e.g., SHAP) so that analytical results are transparent to FAA decision-makers.
• Supporting FAA activities starting at 06:00 Eastern Time.
• Supporting other analysts/developers in the deployment of dashboards into a production environment.
• Writing documentation for code/processes using Confluence.

A background check will be required for this position.

ATAC is looking for career-minded people with the potential to grow professionally and advance into positions of greater technical and project management responsibility.

Required attributes include:

• BS degree in Mathematics, Computer Science, Data Science, Engineering, or related fields, and 3 or more years of relevant experience.
• Strong proficiency in Python for data analysis, statistical modeling, and machine learning (Num Py, pandas, scikit-learn, or equivalent).
• Experience with the Java, R, and JavaScript programming languages.
• Experience with deploying ML models into a production environment and determining features from large datasets.
• Experience using Oracle and PostgreSQL databases to retrieve, process, and store data.
• Experience working in Windows and Unix/Linux environments.
• Experience using Git and other collaborative tools.
• Excellent skills with Microsoft Office including Excel, PowerPoint, and Word.
• Excellent written and oral communication skills and interpersonal relations skills.

Desirable attributes include:

• Masters degree in Mathematics, Computer Science, Engineering, or related fields and 1 or more years of relevant experience.
• Air traffic data analytical expertise (especially with air traffic trajectory data, NAS performance metrics including OPSNET, TBFM, NTML, OOOI, and other large data sets).
• Experience with data visualization libraries (Matplotlib, Seaborn, Plotly) for communicating analytical results.
• Experience with ML/statistical techniques such as ensemble methods (random forests, gradient boosting), time-series analysis, and anomaly/outlier detection.
• Experience with geographical information systems and/or geo-computational methods.
• Experience building Tableau and Leaflet dashboards.
• A strong interest in the aviation field and solid understanding of the National Airspace System and FAA objectives.

In addition, the ideal candidate is a team player, open to new ideas, technologies and development methodologies, thinks both logically and creatively, and approaches problems and problem solving with a positive and constructive attitude.

ATAC offers a casual business environment within a supportive team of innovative individuals. Pride in ATAC's working and aviation-focused environment and culture is key to our success. Those who share this passion will thrive here. If this sounds like you, please send your résumé, including a cover letter in which you summarize the particular elements of your background that relate to the requirements of this position.