Senior Data Scientist

Washington DC Metro Area, Raleigh, Charlottesville VA Highly preferred | Remote

Clearance Required: Must be a US Citizen and eligible to obtain a Public Trust clearance

Data Driven. People Centered.

Elder Research Inc. is a Data Science consulting firm specialized in providing analytic solutions to clients in Commercial and Government industries. Providing analytic solutions to hundreds of companies across numerous industries, our team enjoys a great variety in the type of work they do and exposure to a wide range of techniques and tools

We are trusted advisors to our clients, building lasting relationships and partnering as preferred analytics providers. We use a variety of programming languages and tools to create analytic solutions, often fitting within our clients’ environment and needs.

Join our team and find great opportunities to hone your analytic skills, work on complex problems with amazing teammates, and gain valuable analytics consulting experience.

Summary of Position:

Elder Research is seeking a Senior Data Scientists to support our work for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) through our GovCiv Business Unit.

Anticipated outcomes for this work include progress towards:

• Developing improved risk adjustment methodologies using AI that are rigorously derived, thoroughly tested, and defensible, and have the potential to inspire confidence among stakeholders;
• Devising AI algorithms that can assist CMS in understanding and addressing coding intensity and risk score growth to improve on CMS’ existing policies to account for coding intensity;
• More accurately understanding the “optimal” cost of care for a given beneficiary in the context of health equity and improving care access and quality for underserved beneficiaries;
• Accounting for practical considerations by identifying and preventing or mitigating potential unintended consequences that could arise from AI-assisted risk adjustment and coding intensity adjustment.
• Develop and train advanced machine learning models, with a focus on building recommendation systems and enhancing predictive accuracy.
• Perform feature engineering to improve model performance and adapt to various data sources and structures.
• Leverage expertise in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to create intelligent, context-aware applications.
• Apply machine learning and deep learning techniques, particularly with neural networks, for tasks such as time-series forecasting and complex data analysis.
• Maintain a strong focus on ML development best practices, including data preparation, model evaluation, and continuous improvement.

Essential Functions:

• Participate in meetings as appropriate to support the program goals.
• Perform literature research on mutually identified areas of interest to support program goals.
• Suggest potential statistical, machine learning, and AI analytical approaches, methodologies and techniques that might further progress against the anticipated outcomes described above. Including, but not limited to, the description, literature review, documentation, and communication of those potential approaches.
• Research, review, and discuss and topics related to topics of interest to the program.
• Provide suggestions on the application of statistical and machine learning algorithms to the analysis being performed such as the choice of statistical model and hyper parameters, predictive features, and definition of the target variable(s).
• Provide feedback and guidance on the use of algorithms and formulas used in computer code for training machine learning and AI models or deriving statistics for output.
• Review and provide feedback on analysis outputs performed by other members of the team. The analysis outputs might include statistical output, slides, or documentation of results and findings.
• Perform data preparation tasks to apply transformations needed for statistical analysis, machine learning, and/or AI analytical approaches.
• Create technical artifacts such as scripts or notebooks to perform potential statistical, machine learning, and AI analytical approaches.
• Manage source code versioning with available tools such as Github.
• Perform quality control (QC) checks on developed code and assist in QC initiatives on the project as appropriate.
• Prepare materials such as presentation slides or reports for discussion on technical topics.
• Assist in the development of the documents such as the Analysis Plan and Findings Report which could include drafting, editing, or reviewing sections of the document.

Job Specifications/Requirements:

• 4-5+ years of relevant experience
• MS Degree in computer science, engineering, statistics, mathematics, or related discipline
• Core SDS & DS capabilities in Data Science & Machine Learning

Desired Skills:

• PhD in computer science, engineering, statistics, mathematics, or related discipline would be a positive differentiator
• Healthcare work
• Claims data
• ICD-10 data
• Commercial experience (Healthcare Clients is a bonus but Other Industries are ok)
• Highly categorical
• Baselines to xgboosts
• Deep learning, especially text
• Transformers and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM)
• Embedding models
• Recommender models on high dimensional sparse data

About Elder Research, Inc

Elder Research is a fast growing consulting firm specializing in predictive analytics. Being in the data mining business almost 30 years, we pride ourselves in our ability to find creative, cutting edge solutions to real-world problems. We work hard to provide the best value to our clients and allow each person to contribute their ideas and put their skills to use immediately.

Our team members are passionate, curious, life-long learners. We value humility, servant-leadership, teamwork, and integrity. We seek to serve our clients and our teammates to the best of our abilities. In keeping with our entrepreneurial spirit, we want candidates who are self-motivated with an innate curiosity and strong team work.

Elder Research believes in continuous learning and community - each week the entire company attends a “Tech Talk” and each office location provides lunch. Elder Research provides a supportive work environment with established parental, bereavement, and PTO policies. By prioritizing a healthy work-life balance - with reasonable hours, solid pay, low travel, and extremely flexible time off - Elder Research enables and encourages its employees to serve others and enjoy their lives.

Elder Research, Inc. is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, or protected veteran status and will not be discriminated against on the basis of disability.

Elder Research is a Government contractor and many of our positions require US Citizenship.