Senior Data Scientist, MNO Data

About the role

GiveDirectly works with Mobile Network Operators (MNO) to infer residence location from their data records, helping target the poorest households and support emergency responses. It is hiring a Senior Data Scientist to make this work repeatable: improving and extending a library of method templates, adapting them to each new operator and setting, and designing new elements when needed. The role reports to the Senior Product Manager - MNO data, is remote with substantial international travel (25-50% of time depending on emergencies), and hiring is prioritized in several African and European countries.

Key responsibilities

• Improve and extend analytical method templates for inferring where people live from MNO data, and design novel methods when an intervention requires it
• Support technical conversations with operators, clarifying data needs and steering discussions toward workable technical designs
• Assess what can be inferred from each operator's data given data types and sparsity
• Write tests and method specifications (steps, parameters, pseudocode, validation criteria) for MNO data engineers to implement
• Guide operator engineering teams through implementation, in writing and in person
• Run in-country workshops with operators to support new analyses and tune parameters based on statistical tests
• Feed every new analytical and implementation element back into standard templates
• Design for privacy from the start, using aggregation, minimization and privacy-enhancing technologies such as private set intersection or homomorphic encryption
• Protect confidentiality, improve internal data security processes, and build training material for technical and non-technical teams

Required profile

• Strong mathematical modeling, machine learning and statistics
• Deep comfort with spatio-temporal data: temporal filtering, GIS, probability distributions, combinatorial reasoning and sparse, irregular observations
• Ability to reason without ground truth and to balance accuracy against implementability
• Excellent communication skills, able to explain methods and limitations to multiple audiences
• Experience writing technical specifications that other teams implemented
• Commitment to privacy by design, confidentiality and to designing training material that changes how colleagues use a data source
• Comfort in fast-moving contexts and with travel to fragile and post-disaster contexts
• English required; French, Portuguese, Swahili or Spanish preferred

Required skills

• SQL and Python (reviewing code by others; writing production-quality code is welcome but not required)
• Call Detail Records (CDRs) or latching data is a strong plus; comparable experience with mobility, transport, sensor or remote-sensing data counts
• Familiarity with privacy-enhancing technologies (private set intersection, secure multi-party computation, homomorphic encryption) is a strong plus
• Desirable: poverty modeling, survey data and instruments, experience inside or close to a mobile network operator, open-source contributions in mobility estimation