Data Scientist - 90394593 - Washington

****PLEASE NOTE: ****

Amtrak OIG is not a Federal agency. Our employment opportunities are not federal jobs.

Join with the Inspector General to help make America’s railroad operate more efficiently and effectively. Our team provides independent oversight of Amtrak’s programs and operations and works diligently to prevent and detect fraud, waste, and abuse by Amtrak employees, contractors, or vendors. This work not only helps to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of Amtrak, but it also informs decision-making by Amtrak’s Board of Directors, Amtrak management, and Congress. We employ a diverse team of auditors, special agents, analysts, forensic examiners, lawyers, and support staff to complete our exciting mission. Join us as we continue toward our goal of building a model OIG centered on independence, teamwork, diversity, work-life balance, and oversight that makes a difference!

SUMMARY OF DUTIES:

The Data Scientist collects, prepares and analyzes data to help the OIG conduct audits and investigations of Amtrak (the company) programs and operations, in accordance with lawful standards. The incumbent will support complex audits and sensitive criminal, civil, and administrative investigations with data analytics strategies that help assess the economy, efficiency, and effectiveness of Amtrak programs and operations and help identify potential fraud, waste, and abuse. Evidence the incumbent develops may also be used by OIG investigators for civil or criminal accountability in conjunction with relevant United States Attorney Offices. The incumbent will work with OIG Data Analysts, Data Engineers, and company resources to access data, learn related business processes, identify relevant internal controls, ensure completeness and accuracy of the data, and generate business insights using advanced data analytics techniques such as machine learning and artificial intelligence.

ESSENTIAL FUNCTIONS:

• Works independently without significant supervisory guidance and takes the lead, as needed, in collecting, preparing, and analyzing data.
• Takes direction from the Director or Senior Director of Data Analytics to prioritize requests for data analyses and ensures compliance with OIG and company policies, standard operating procedures, and best practices.
• Learns company systems and related business processes and identifies internal controls relevant to the analytic objective. Becomes a subject matter expert on some business areas such as safety and security, contract management, procurement practices, vendor management, finance, human resources, payroll, public corruption, revenue management, and healthcare.
• Works with auditors and investigators, learns their objectives, identifies data relevant to their objectives, brainstorms analytic ideas to help auditors and investigators use available data elements from different systems, and consults them on the quality and reliability of the data and effective ways to analyze them for significant insights.
• Proposes expert data analytic strategies using available tools to identify trends or solve business problems in support of complex audits and investigations in various business areas.
• Helps identify potential fraud, waste and abuse, and provides input and insight to further investigations.
• Builds advanced data analytics tests and models to generate meaningful insights and identifies opportunities to innovatively use available data to identify signals and patterns to help auditors and investigators make decisions.
• Independently checks own work to ensure that the evidence the data analytics generate is free of errors and consistent with established guidelines and processes before providing results to auditors and investigators.
• Ensures analytic results are reliable, sufficient, and relevant such that they can support audit findings and recommendations or the investigative evidence the OIG presents to the United States Attorney’s office.
• Creates effective data visualizations that provide business insights, illustrate risk areas, and can be periodically updated using automation.
• Performs quality assurance reviews of others’ work and prepares own reports to a high degree of excellence.
• Develops productive working relationships with internal and external parties.  Interfaces with various levels of the organization including Senior Management, maintains communication with system and data owners, and monitors changes to the sources system that impact OIG’s access to the data and downstream analyses and reports.
• Works with Data Engineer and OIG IT Mission Support team to implement best security practices for data governance and monitor compliance with OIG and c