[Hiring] Senior Data Scientist @GiveDirectly

Role Description

GiveDirectly gives cash directly to people living in poverty and in emergencies. Both depend on the same question: did this person live in this place, at this time? We ask it when we target the poorest households, and when a disaster displaces a community overnight. Location records held by Mobile Network Operators (MNO) can help us estimate an answer to this question at scale.

We are hiring a Senior Data Scientist to progress our work on location inference from MNO data, and to make it repeatable. Your job is to:

• Improve and extend our library of method templates.
• Adapt methods to each new operator and setting.
• Design new elements when an intervention requires it.
• Assess what can be inferred from a given operator's data.
• Specify the analysis clearly for data engineers to implement.
• Support introductory meetings with MNOs.
• Inform the work of data privacy and cybersecurity teams.
• Help colleagues understand the strengths and limitations of this data source.

This work is live in several countries, and we're expanding it across the countries where we have offices and to low- and middle-income countries anywhere in the world when a crisis hits.

Qualifications

• Exceptional alignment with GiveDirectly Values.
• Strong mathematical modeling, machine learning, and statistics.
• Deep comfort with spatio-temporal data.
• The ability to reason without ground truth.
• Pragmatism about the trade-off between accuracy and implementability.
• Excellent communication and relationship-building skills.
• Experience writing technical specifications.
• Able to read and review SQL and Python.
• Commitment to privacy by design.
• Commitment to confidentiality.
• Experience designing training material.
• Comfort in fast-moving contexts.

Requirements

• Substantial international travel, roughly 25 to 50% of your time.
• Language Requirement: English.
• Language Preferences: French, Portuguese, Swahili, or Spanish.

Benefits

• Base Salary in the United States: $107,070
• Bonus at Target Performance: 10%
• Annual Benefits Stipend: $21,393
• Base Salary in the United Kingdom: £70,250
• Annual Benefits Stipend: £2,760
• Base Salary in Kenya: $72,550
• Annual Benefits Stipend: $8,454
• This role is fully remote.