Data Scientist

Role Overview

Elder Research is seeking a Data Scientist to support the IRS mission to improve tax compliance, fraud detection, and risk identification. This is a remote role preferably in the Washington DC area with hybrid time and potential on-site client travel as required.

Responsibilities

• Work with government clients, program managers, and technical teams to understand business and compliance challenges and define analytical approaches.
• Develop, test, and deploy predictive and statistical models using structured and unstructured data to identify anomalies, non-compliance risk, and potential fraud.
• Contribute across the full data science lifecycle: problem formulation → data exploration → modeling → validation → deployment → stakeholder communication.
• Perform data exploration, cleaning, and wrangling on large, complex datasets to produce actionable insights.
• Build quantitative and qualitative data science solutions and predictive risk models (e.g., audit selection, refund review, fraud prevention), ensuring robustness, sensitivity, and significance testing for defensible results.
• Apply supervised and unsupervised statistical/ML techniques for anomaly detection, fraud identification, and risk scoring.
• Deliver both technical and non-technical briefings and reports, translating compliance needs into technical solutions.

Requirements

• Programming experience (preferably Python or R), including data exploration, feature engineering, model development, and writing modular, reusable, well-documented code with peer review.
• Experience with Python, SQL, and Databricks for data analysis, modeling, and statistical evaluation; familiarity with Markdown for technical documentation.
• Strong skills in data exploration and wrangling for large datasets.
• Strong understanding of relational databases and SQL.
• Experience with version control (e.g., Git) and collaborative development.
• Bachelor’s degree in a relevant field (e.g., statistics, computer science, math, analytics, data science).
• 2–10+ years of experience in data science/analytics or a related technical field.
• Ability/willingness to learn new tools, methodologies, and domains; comfortable working in fast-paced, collaborative environments.
• Security clearance required: IRS MBI (as stated in the posting).
• Willingness to travel and work on-site at client locations as required.

Preferred Qualifications

• MS or PhD in statistics or computer science.