Data Scientist - Emergency Appointment

The Los Angeles County Department of Human Resources is making an emergency appointment for a Data Scientist role focused on work related to the homelessness crisis. This position supports the Department of Homeless Services and Housing (HSH) and contributes end-to-end data science analyses intended to inform program, policy, and operational decisions.

Based in Los Angeles County, CA (onsite), this role partners across divisions and stakeholders to define business problems, develop analyses and predictive models, and translate results into findings that can be acted on by both technical and nontechnical audiences.

• Collaborate with division, department, and countywide stakeholders to solicit, define, and manage data science projects from inception through implementation, including developing statements of business problems and conducting exploratory data analysis and data mining.
• Develop and present visualizations of findings and recommendations that support business decisions and resource allocation.
• Document business requirements with departmental stakeholders and frame business problems so appropriate data science techniques can be selected and applied.
• Work with departmental subject matter experts to identify and select relevant data sources, including internal and external, and structured and unstructured data.
• Partner with departmental Information Technology to support collection, integration, and retention requirements for large structured and unstructured datasets, and consult with data engineers and architects on data systems and process design.
• Collaborate with other Data Scientists, Analysts, and IT staff to select, evaluate, improve, and document tools and systems that strengthen analytic capacity.
• Independently conduct advanced analytical studies, transforming data into actionable information using machine learning, bivariate and multivariate analyses, predictive or prescriptive analytics, and optimization.
• Use statistical computer scripting and programming and analytic tools to ingest, manipulate, prepare, augment, evaluate, analyze, summarize, and visualize data.
• Plan, design, and manage experiments, consumer surveys, and other data collection initiatives as needed to address business problems.
• Review the work of Predictive Data Analysts and other lower-level analysts for quality control.
• Communicate findings through oral, written, and visual methods, including presentations and interactive tools, to reach technical and nontechnical staff, stakeholders, and members of the public.
• Work with program staff to ensure analyses translate into actionable, data-driven program, policy, and operational decision-making.
• Assist in implementing recommended process changes while maintaining best practices from the analysis and accounting for operational realities.
• Develop analytics-driven products such as dashboards and reports.
• Contribute to advanced analytic products (including recommender engines, auto classification algorithms, predictive scoring, geo-spatial clustering, and NLP classifiers) and support placement into production.
• Recommend ongoing improvements to methods and algorithms and provide business metrics to demonstrate improvement initially and across iterations, including tracking, monitoring, troubleshooting, and implementing enhancements.
• Maintain familiarity with current industry and academic research through ongoing training and professional development.
• Develop relationships with local academic data science programs, support recruitment of data science interns, and oversee intern work on departmental projects.

• Option I: Two (2) years of experience applying advanced statistical analyses, including predictive analytics, to produce…