Senior Data Scientist, RegLab - Stanford Law School

• Excellent written and verbal communication, including documenting systems, decisions,

Full Time

This is for a ONE-YEAR FIXED TERM position with the opportunity for extension based on performance.

Multiple Positions will be Filled

• Budgeted Range:
  The Law School’s budgeted pay for or this position is: $117,134 - $130,006 per annum.

The Regulation, Evaluation, and Governance Lab (Reg Lab) at Stanford University is looking for a Senior Data Scientist to help drive forward a diverse research program focused on public sector artificial intelligence (AI) applications and policy. We are looking for someone who has excellent technical skills, strong research expertise, good communication skills, and is motivated by the mission of the lab.

About Us:

Stanford Reg Lab builds the evidence base and technology for effective government.

Our interdisciplinary team of engineers, data scientists, social scientists, and legal experts partners with agencies at every level—from federal departments to states, counties, and cities - bringing frontier AI, machine learning, and causal inference to the public sector.

Reg Lab’s work has prompted an overhaul of tax auditing, mapped racial covenants across millions of records, and enabled streamlining of statutes and regulations.

• Work closely with the Faculty Director, research leadership, and the rest of 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, statistical models, and other programs designed to improve the public sector.
• Work with large untapped data sets, such as: health and environmental enforcement data, mass adjudication records, high-resolution satellite imagery, and the largest publicly available corpus of legal text.
• Mentor and/or manage other data scientists and junior researchers.
• Have the opportunity to receive co-authorship on research papers.

• Collaborate with interdisciplinary research teams and external stakeholders to identify high-impact opportunities for applied data science in the public sector.
• Engage with partners to understand their data environments, help shape project goals, and ensure that technical outputs align with real-world needs and constraints.
• Adapt and refine existing AI models to align with the constraints and ethical considerations of public sector use cases, 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 a variety of sources such as reports, legal documents, notes, survey results, and satellite imagery, and maintain its accuracy and completeness.
• Determine additional data collection and reporting requirements.
• Create complex charts and databases, perform statistical analyses, and develop graphs and tables for publication and presentation.
• Serve as a resource for non-routine inquiries such as requests for statistics or surveys.
• Provide documentation based on audit and reporting criteria to investigators and research staff.
• Communicate findings and technical insights clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences through reports, visualizations, presentations, and academic publications.

• A bachelor’s degree (MS or Ph.D. preferred) in a scientific or analytic field (e.g., data science, computer science, statistics, engineering, mathematics, economics, or a related field) and three years of (a) relevant professional experience or (b) combination of education and relevant professional experience.
• Strong programming skills in Python or a similar language, including debugging and writing…