Senior Data Scientist, MNO Data

About the role

GiveDirectly gives cash directly to people living in poverty and in emergencies, and relies on Mobile Network Operator (MNO) data to estimate whether a person lived in a target place at a given time. This Senior Data Scientist role improves and extends the library of method templates for inferring residence from MNO data, adapting them to each operator and setting and designing new elements when needed. The position is full time in Nairobi, Kenya, with substantial international travel of about 25 to 50% of the time.

Key responsibilities

• Improve and extend method templates for inferring residence from MNO data, and for detecting displacement or estimating poverty, and design new methods when needed
• Support technical conversations with operators, clarifying the data needed and steering discussions toward workable technical designs
• Assess what can be inferred from each operator's data given data types and sparsity, and support intervention design to account for data quality
• Write tests and method specifications (steps, parameters, pseudocode, validation criteria) for MNO data engineers, and guide their implementation in writing and in person
• Run in-country workshops with operators to set up new analyses and tune parameters, and feed results 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 the confidentiality of partner data and improve internal data security processes and tools
• Build internal training material so all teams understand the strengths and limits of this data source

Required profile

• Degree in Statistics, Computer Science or Data Science and 4+ years of experience in predictive modeling, spatial analysis and MNO data analytics
• Strong mathematical modeling, machine learning and statistics, with deep comfort with spatio-temporal data, GIS and sparse observations
• Experience with Call Detail Records (CDRs) or latching data is a strong plus; comparable experience with mobility, transport, sensor or remote-sensing data counts
• Able to reason without ground truth and to balance accuracy against implementability
• Excellent communication skills, able to explain methods to engineers, data protection officers and leadership, and to write technical specifications
• Commitment to privacy by design and confidentiality, and experience designing training material
• English required; French, Portuguese, Swahili or Spanish preferred

The application is made through the corporate staffing partner recruiting for GiveDirectly.