Data Scientist - Social Listening & Media Monitoring Consultant

Location: Washington

We improve lives

The IDB Group is a community of diverse, versatile, and passionate people who come together on a journey to improve lives in Latin America and the Caribbean. Our people find purpose and do what they love in an inclusive, collaborative, agile, and rewarding environment.

About this position

The Communications Division (DCC) of the External Affairs and Communications (EXC) department uses digital intelligence, data, and creativity to help position the IDB Group as the preferred partner for development in the region. DCC works with press, web, email, social media, and paid media channels to help give visibility to stories of impact in the region.

The Communications Division (DCC) is seeking a Data Scientist specializing in Social Listening and Media Monitoring to support the organization in extracting insights from large-scale digital and media data. This role focuses on applying statistical methods, Python-based data analysis, and computational models to analyze public discourse, media coverage, and stakeholder narratives, transforming complex datasets into actionable intelligence that informs strategic communications and reputation management.

The team's mission:
The IDB's Communications Division builds and protects the reputation of the IDB Group. From this perspective, the communication effort is focused on:

* Strengthen the IDB as a partner of choice, highlighting its attributes of closeness and responsibility to the region.

* Show the IDB as a real honest information broker, which provides an accurate curator of information between the noise, uncertainty, and speed of the moment.

What you'll do

* Design, implement, and maintain data pipelines for collecting, cleaning, and structuring large-scale social media and traditional media datasets from platforms such as Brandwatch, Talkwalker, Lexis Nexis, Global News, and Google-based sources.

* Apply artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and statistical methods to analyze large volumes of unstructured text data, identifying trends, anomalies, risks, and emerging narratives related to IDB Group brands, sectors, countries, and stakeholders.

* Develop and deploy Python‑based AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP) workflows for tasks such as sentiment scoring, emotion detection, topic modeling, entity recognition, and narrative classification across social and media data.

* Conduct advanced quantitative and qualitative analyses of digital conversations and media coverage to support strategic communications, crisis monitoring, and institutional positioning.

* Build and maintain reproducible analytical and machine‑learning models (including predictive, clustering, and network models) to identify influencers, assess reputational risk, and analyze information diffusion patterns.

* Collaborate with communications, digital engagement, and technical teams to integrate analytics outputs into decision-making processes.

* Translate complex data and analytical findings into clear, compelling data-driven storytelling, with a strong emphasis on how numbers, trends, and reports are presented to non-technical audiences.

* Engage closely with internal clients to understand their analytical needs, define the type of reporting required, and clearly explain insights, findings, and implications derived from data through effective storytelling.

* Ensure data governance, quality control, and methodological rigor across all digital intelligence datasets and analyses.

* Provide technical guidance and capacity building to internal teams on data-driven approaches, analytics methodologies, and interpretation of results.

What you'll need

* Education:

Bachelor's degree in data science, Statistics, Computer Science, Economics, Engineering, Applied Mathematics, or a related quantitative field.

* Experience:

Between 2 to 4 years of relevant experience in data science, analytics, or digital intelligence roles. Demonstrated experience working with large, unstructured datasets, particularly text-based data from social or media sources.

* Languages:

Proficiency in Spanish and English, spoken and written, is required. Additional knowledge of French and Portuguese is preferable.

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