Senior Data Scientist – Biodiversity Conservation

About the role

Natural State is hiring a Senior Data Scientist in Nairobi (Westlands) to apply a strong technical background to real-world biodiversity conservation and restoration projects. The ideal candidate has ideas on how biodiversity data can improve decision-making and enjoys building data pipelines, working remotely in a small, high-performance team.

Required profile

• 5+ years of work experience and a degree in data science, computer science, statistics, mathematics, quantitative ecology or a related field.
• Experience working with ecological and biodiversity data such as camera trap images, passive acoustic recordings, vegetation and animal surveys, species lists, soil carbon and biomass, remote sensing observations and climate data.
• Detail-oriented, able to manage their own workload remotely and enjoy contributing to a small team.

Required skills

• Strong Python for scientific data work: pandas or polars for data handling, plus numpy, scipy, statsmodels and scikit-learn (or equivalent).
• Ability to write validation scripts that catch schema mismatches early.
• Strong statistical reasoning, including confidence intervals, uncertainty estimation, GLMs and discriminative machine learning models.
• Confident SQL, including joins, CTEs and window functions.
• Independent investigation of data issues in pgAdmin, DBeaver or similar.
• Strongly desired: spatial data in PostGIS, QGIS and GeoPandas, and remote sensing data.
• Nice to have: ODK, KoboToolbox or Survey123 (ODK Central admin experience is a plus).