Conservation Data Scientist

Job Posting Title:

Conservation Data Scientist

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Hiring Department:

College of Natural Sciences

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Position Open To:

All Applicants

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Weekly Scheduled Hours:

40

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FLSA Status:

Exempt

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Earliest Start Date:

Jan 01, 2025

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Position Duration:

Expected to Continue Until Dec 31, 2026

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Location:

UT MAIN CAMPUS

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Job Details:

General Notes

This position ends two-years from initial hire date. The position will include a full-time benefits package.

Security sensitive; criminal background check conducted on selected candidate. Hiring decision is contingent upon applicant successfully clearing background check.

Purpose

The Conservation Data Scientist will work with the University of Texas Insect Collection Curator and the Texas Department of Parks and Wildlife to aggregate, filter, and analyze publicly available biodiversity data on Texas invertebrate species, with the goal of presenting a set of estimated conservation status metrics and related tools on a public website.

Responsibilities

• Data aggregation, filtering, and analysis

• Creation of a public-facing portal

• Coordination with collaborating teams

• Public outreach

• Assist the UT Insect Collection in public outreach events, conduct incidental curation work in the UT Insect Collection related to data correction and improvement.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree and 4 years of related experience.

• Have created interactive websites with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (or TypeScript), and can provide examples.

• Experience with at least one statically typed language such as TypeScript, Java, C, C++, Pascal

• Familiarity with R

• Comfortable with command line usage on Unix/Linux

• Comfortable using git and GitHub for version control

• Creative and confident problem solver

• Good communication skills

• Able to work independently with minimal supervision

• Able to decompose large projects into manageable pieces

• Experience, including college-level coursework, in field biology, conservation, entomology, natural history collections, or related field.

• Relevant education and experience may be substituted as appropriate.

Preferred Qualifications

Bachelor's degree in entomology, biology, museum studies, or a related field.

More than 4 years experience in conservation biology, field biology, biodiversity, or related field.

Familiarity with the basic functions of natural history collections.

Have written programs for Node.js (can just list Node.js; for leveraging existing cave code)

Experienced with TypeScript, Python, Nginx website deployment, and writing unit tests with Jest or Vitest (can just list Jest or Vitest)

Experienced with full stack web development:

• Experienced with a reactive frontend framework such as Svelte, React, Vue, or Angular

• Experienced with a backend framework such as Express, Django, Flask, Spring, Laravel, Rails

• Experienced developing REST APIs

• Experienced with relational databases and SQL

• Experienced automating frontend testing such as via Cypress, Playwright, or Puppeteer

Salary Range

$73,000+ depending on qualifications

Working Conditions

• May work around standard office conditions

• May work around chemicals

• Repetitive use of a keyboard at a workstation

Work Shift

• Flexible: 40 hours/week is required, and most of this time should be during normal business hours (e.g., 9:00am-5:00pm), although numbers of hours/day and days/week can be negotiated and may change depending on what projects are being pursued.

Required Materials

• Resume/CV

• Letter of interest

• 3 work references with their contact information; at least one reference should be from a supervisor

• 1 letter of recommendation

Important for applicants who are NOT current university employees or contingent workers: You will be prompted to submit your resume the first time you apply, then you will be provided an option to upload a new Resume for subsequent applications. Any additional Required Materials (letter of interest, references, etc.) will be uploaded in the Application Questions section