[Remote] Data Scientist

Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Priorities USA runs digital voter mobilization and persuasion campaigns and develops data-driven tools for progressive causes. The Data Scientist contractor will support R&D by prototyping, evaluating, and implementing analytical methods, LLM applications, datasets, pipelines, and software for digital campaigns.

Responsibilities

• Explore, prototype, and validate new analytical methods and LLM applications across a range of political, media, and advertising data contexts
• Build proof-of-concept tools, features, and datasets, and iterate on them based on feedback from digital practitioners
• Engineer validated methods into modular, sturdy, well-documented pipelines and applications that are ready to graduate into production systems
• Develop software primarily through agentic development workflows, producing well-specified, reviewable, tested, and documented code
• Think critically about what data is saying and communicate findings, tradeoffs, and recommendations clearly to technical and non-technical audiences

Skills

• Strong programming skills in SQL and Python
• Demonstrated ability to apply statistical and data science methods in real-world contexts
• Strong software engineering habits (version control, code review, testing, documentation)
• Hands-on experience applying LLMs in real projects — e.g., prompt and context engineering, classification or extraction pipelines, evaluation of model outputs, or agentic frameworks
• Experience working with agentic software development tools (e.g., Cursor, Claude Code, Codex)
• Experience working with GCP (and preferably AWS), including building and maintaining data pipelines
• Experience using git + GitHub
• Familiarity with cybersecurity best practices
• Strong communication skills and the ability to collaborate across teams with different working styles and levels of technical experience
• Demonstrated curiosity and self-directed exploration through side projects, prototypes, experiments, or other evidence that you build and try things on your own initiative
• Experience communicating with diverse groups, working in a multicultural workforce, and bringing a sensitivity and appreciation of cultural differences
• Contractors must be based in the United States
• We expect availability for regular check-ins during Eastern Time business hours
• Experience working with digital advertising, media performance, social listening, or media consumption data
• Experience working with political, advocacy, or campaign data such as voter files
• Experience with containerization and orchestration
• Experience developing front-end applications or dashboards
• Experience building evaluation frameworks or benchmarks for LLM or ML systems

Benefits

• Remote engagement
• Compensated take-home exercise

Company Overview