Senior/Staff Data Scientist (ACF)

About Skylight

Skylight is a digital consultancy using design and technology to help government agencies deliver better public services. We’re at the forefront of a civic movement to reinvent how all levels of government serve families, patients, and many others in today's digital world.

If you want to play a part in driving this critical movement forward, we’d love for you to join our growing team of public interest technologists. The work we do matters.

About the job

At Skylight, data scientists organize, synthesize, and analyze data to help government stakeholders and product teams make informed decisions. They apply a variety of analytical models to find meaningful insights in both structured and unstructured data, and they communicate these insights in an easily digestible format.

As a data scientist supporting ACF’s grants management systems, you will play a critical role in analyzing, validating and communicating grants data across the full lifecycle—from award issuance and compliance tracking to monitoring, reporting, and closeout. High-quality data is foundational to effective oversight, transparency, and stewardship of federal funds.

What you’ll do

• Identify valuable data sources and automate collection processes
• Undertake preprocessing of structured and unstructured data
• Analyze large amounts of information to discover trends and patterns
• Build predictive models and machine-learning algorithms
• Combine models through ensemble modeling
• Present information using data visualization techniques
• Propose solutions and strategies for business challenges
• Select and use the right tools, frameworks, languages, and technologies for the job, with a preference for open-source solutions
• Collaborate with others as part of a cross-functional team that includes user experience researchers and designers, product managers, engineers, and other functional specialists
• Analyze and validate data across the full federal grants lifecycle, ensuring data supports compliance, monitoring, and closeout
• Evaluate data quality, governance, and audibility in multi-system grants environments
• Support operational resilience and stewardship of public funds through targeted analytical insights

What we're looking for

Minimum qualifications

• Can think about and use data strategically to identify the right questions to ask, communicate ideas, surface opportunities to create business value and drive decisions
• Familiar with modern data engineering, including techniques for cleaning and preprocessing data from a variety of sources
• Ability to analyze a data set using the appropriate analytical method and can design, prototype, and build statistical models that are credible, effective, and accessible
• Ability to preserve privacy and security when performing data analysis
• Can articulately communicate your data, models, and findings to technical and non-technical audiences
• Ability to use the appropriate visualization tools to highlight actionable insights, trends, and recommendations from data
• Champion leading practices within data science to your team and others
• Ability to work effectively in policy and compliance driven environments balancing accuracy with evolving reporting and decision-making needs
• Ability to work successfully within a professional services environment (e.g., can communicate effectively with clients)
• A passion for creating better public outcomes through great government services
• A mindset and work approach that aligns with our core values

Nice-to-have qualifications

• Experience with Palantir Foundry
• Familiarity with Power BI
• Prior experience working in the civic tech space
• Experience working in a remote-team environment

Don’t meet 100% of the criteria but think you can do the job? We’d love to chat anyway! We’re on a mission to build diverse teams, and studies have shown that women and marginalized folks are less likely to apply to jobs if they don’t check every box.

Other requirements

• All work must be conducted within the U.S., excluding U.S. territories. Some federal contracts require U.S. citizenship to be eligible for employment.
• You must be legally authorized to work in the U.S. now and in the future without sponsorship.
• As a government contractor, you may be required to obtain a public trust or security clearance.
• You may be required to complete a company background check successfully.
• Some of our available roles are on federal contracts that require