Data Scientist

Unissant, Inc. delivers innovative capabilities to the agencies that keep our nation healthy and safe. We apply our domain expertise, data acumen, and technology know-how to achieve breakthrough results for our clients. Working collaboratively, we advance missions and careers through a focus on honesty, integrity, and dependability. We continuously look for talent, excited to join that effort. To learn more about our exciting organization, please visit us at www.unissant.com.

We are seeking a Data Scientist to join our team and support our client in Ashburn, VA. The ideal candidate will bring experience applying computer vision, image analysis, statistical analysis, machine learning, and data modeling techniques to solve complex mission and business challenges. This role is well suited for a hands-on analytical professional who can work with image, biometric, transactional, and related datasets; build and evaluate image-analysis and predictive models; and communicate insights that support informed decision-making in an Agile team environment.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:

• Perform hands-on data analysis to support the development of image-analysis models, predictive models, visual analytics, and reporting solutions.

• Extract, clean, transform, label, annotate, and interpret image, biometric, transactional, and related datasets within a defined problem space to support model development and analytical reporting.
• Apply computer vision, statistical, and machine-learning techniques to design, train, evaluate, fine-tune, and deploy models that inform mission decisions.
• Apply image-analysis techniques such as image classification, object detection, image segmentation, image matching, feature extraction, face detection, facial verification, image-quality analysis, or related computer-vision capabilities.
• Explore and compare a variety of modeling tools, methods, and programming languages to identify high-performing analytical and image-analysis approaches.
• Support exploratory data analysis, feature development, image-data preparation, annotation, training-set construction, model evaluation, and model-improvement activities.
• Assess model performance, including false positives, false negatives, model bias, data-quality issues, and operational limitations; recommend improvements as needed.
• Work collaboratively within a large Agile development team.

Work Experience and Job Skills:

• Two (2) or more years of experience in data science, computer vision, image analysis, advanced analytics, machine learning, biometrics, or related technical work is required.
• Experience developing, training, fine-tuning, evaluating, or deploying machine-learning or deep-learning models for computer vision, image analysis, or related capabilities.
• Experience with image classification, object detection, image segmentation, image matching, facial recognition, facial verification, image quality, liveness detection, or similar image-analysis techniques is strongly preferred.
• Familiarity with biometric technologies, biometric data, identity verification, facial recognition, fingerprints, iris recognition, liveness detection, image matching, or image-quality assessment is strongly preferred.
• Experience developing machine-learning models and applying advanced analytics techniques to solve complex mission or business problems.
• Proficiency with programming languages such as Python, R, Scala, or Java; Python experience with computer-vision or machine-learning libraries is strongly preferred.
• Experience with AI/ML, computer-vision, or deep-learning frameworks and libraries such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, Keras, OpenCV, scikit-learn, YOLO, Detectron, or equivalent platforms.
• Strong SQL programming skills and experience constructing queries to extract and prepare data for exploratory analysis, image-data processing, and model development.
• Experience with statistical software and analytical tools such as SAS, SPSS Modeler, R, WEKA, Jupyter, or equivalent platforms.
• Experience with pattern recognition, automated classification, image categorization, feature extraction, similarity matching, and data categorization techniques.
• Experience with entity resolution methods, including record linkage, named-entity matching, deduplication, disambiguation, identity matching, or biometric matching.
• Familiarity with supervised and unsupervised machine-learning techniques and methods.
• Experience performing data mining, data analysis, image-data preparation, labeling or annotation, and training-set construction.
• Familiarity with model-performance evaluation methods, such as precision, recall, F1 score, ROC-AUC, confusion matrices, mean average precision, false-match rate, false-non-match rate, or equivalent measures.
• Strong analytical thinking, problem-solving skills, and attention to detail.
• Ability to communicate findings effectively to both technical and non-technical audiences.

Education:

• Bachelor's Degree in Mathematics, Statistics, Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, or another related technical field is required.
• Equivalent practical experience may be considered based on client standards.
• Advanced degree in a relevant analytical or technical discipline is preferred.

Certificates, Licenses and Registrations:

• Relevant certifications in analytics, machine learning, computer vision, cloud platforms, data science, or related technologies are a plus.
• Additional technical certifications may be considered based on program needs.

Communication Skills:

• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, including the ability to explain complex analytical and image-analysis findings clearly and effectively.
• Strong collaboration skills and the ability to work across technical and business stakeholders.

Clearance Requirements:

• Ability to obtain and maintain a Public Trust position and favorable suitability determination based on a CBP background investigation is required.
• U.S. citizenship is required due to client and suitability requirements.
• Prior DHS, CBP, federal, law-enforcement, biometric, identity-management, or similarly regulated-environment experience is preferred.

Travel:

This is a hybrid position based in Ashburn, VA, with onsite support expected one to two days per week and additional onsite presence as required by mission needs.

Environmental Requirements:

• Mainly a routine office environment.