Senior Data Scientist

Stanford University’s Regulation, Evaluation, and Governance Lab (Reg Lab) is seeking a Senior Data Scientist for a one-year fixed term role, with potential extension. The position focuses on designing and implementing AI and data projects that support public sector applications and policy.

The Senior Data Scientist will partner with the Faculty Director, research leadership, and the broader Reg Lab team to identify and deliver research initiatives. Work includes developing AI and statistical approaches, mentoring colleagues, and communicating results to technical and non-technical audiences. The role is onsite in Stanford, CA.

• Collaborate with the Faculty Director, research leadership, and the Reg Lab team to explore, identify, and implement research projects.
• Lead the design and development of multiple projects using state-of-the-art AI models, algorithms, and statistical models to improve public sector outcomes.
• Work with large, untapped datasets, including health and environmental enforcement data, mass adjudication records, high-resolution satellite imagery, and a large publicly available legal text corpus.
• Adapt and refine existing AI models for public sector constraints and ethical considerations, including fairness, transparency, and interpretability.
• Develop and test prototype software, and participate in the approval and release process for new software.
• Prioritize and extract data from multiple sources such as reports, legal documents, notes, survey results, and satellite imagery while maintaining accuracy and completeness.
• Identify additional data collection and reporting requirements.
• Create complex charts and databases, perform statistical analyses, and develop graphs and tables for publication and presentations.
• Serve as a resource for non-routine inquiries, including requests for statistics or surveys.
• Provide documentation aligned to audit and reporting criteria for investigators and research staff.
• Communicate findings and technical insights clearly through reports, visualizations, presentations, and academic publications.
• Design and customize reports based on database content.
• Oversee and monitor regulatory compliance for data utilization.
• Use system reports and analyses to detect potentially problematic data, implement corrections, and address root causes or justify solutions for implementation by others.
• Mentor and/or manage other data scientists and junior researchers.
• Collaborate with interdisciplinary teams and external stakeholders to identify high-impact applied data science opportunities.
• Engage with partners to understand data environments, shape project goals, and ensure technical outputs align with real-world needs and constraints.

• Bachelor’s degree and three years of relevant professional experience, or a combination of education and relevant experience.
• Programming strength in Python or a similar language, including debugging and writing maintainable code.
• Solid knowledge of machine learning
  , NLP
  , and information retrieval methods, with experience applying them to large or complex datasets.
• Experience with data modeling and database systems for both structured and unstructured data (for example,
  SQL and document or vector stores).
• Experience building reliable, scalable data pipelines with attention to data quality and validation, including evaluating new tools and frameworks.
• Understanding of security best practices for web applications and backend systems, including authentication, access control, and handling sensitive data.
• Excellent written and verbal communication
  , including documenting systems, decisions, and recommendations for technical and non-technical audiences.

• Python, SQL, Tensor Flow,…