Job Opening: Data Scientist

Grant Witness seeks a data scientist for a full-time position on our team. Grant Witness is a non-profit project, housed under the Raft Foundation, dedicated to monitoring changes to and providing robust public data on U.S. federal grantmaking actions and policy. This is a critical, high-impact role central to a project focused on quantifying and communicating shifts in federal funding, especially those resulting from unpredictable actions like grant and contract terminations, impoundments, and rescissions. The successful candidate will blend detailed research, data science, and forensic journalism to expand our core automated data systems and develop analytical projects. This work creates a comprehensive, detailed, common public resource for tracking funding slowdowns, terminations, and the progress of related policy changes and litigation, while also supporting rapid-response data and analysis requests from various stakeholders.

This position is fully remote, but the candidate must be available M-F for at least four hours per day during U.S. EST working hours (9AM-5PM) for meetings and online collaboration.

While this position is full-time, we anticipate having additional needs for part-time or contract work. Those interested and available for contract work should apply and indicate so on our application form and in their cover letter.

Responsibilities

The Data Scientist will:

  • Design, implement, and maintain automated data collection and analysis pipelines to track changes in U.S. federal grantmaking.
  • Develop a comprehensive reporting, both retroactively through 2025 and forward looking, using two-pronged approach: top-down tracking of program-level disruptions (e.g., freezes of outlays) from government accounting data, and bottom-up forensic analysis collecting data from web scraping, press, and journalistic sources to identify specific project terminations and shifts in federal spending data.
  • Analyze publicly available federal outlay and spending data from sources such as USAspending.gov, the Federal Procurement Data System, and the U.S. Treasury Fiscal Data hub.
  • Contribute to the co-development of public-facing data products, including website and data visualizations to effectively communicate the project’s findings to the public, journalists and policymakers.
  • Maintain a shared data repository and re-usable code base, ensuring reproducibility and security.
  • Respond rapidly to data and analysis queries from journalists, advocates, litigants, and government representatives.

Qualifications (In order of priority):

  • A dedication to defending the rule of law, science, public health, and human rights.
  • A quantitative background at the M.S. or Ph.D. level, or at least 4 years’ relevant work experience or postgraduate training. Relevant fields may include public policy, political science, journalism, epidemiology, data science, or statistics.
  • Demonstrated experience in developing analyses and data pipelines from large, heterogenous sources, and developing rapid working knowledge and insights from unfamiliar data sources and processes
  • Experience with some of the tools in Grant Witness technology stack, with a demonstrated ability to rapidly learn and apply new tools. Our stack includes:
    • R, including the R {targets} build framework and tidyverse tools
    • Web scraping and browser automation
    • git, GitHub, and GitHub Actions for version control and automation
    • PostgreSQL
    • AirTable
    • S3 cloud storage services, Cloudflare
  • Familiarity with U.S. government spending data such as USAspending.gov and data from government agency grant databases.
  • Familiarity with grant-making procedures from U.S. federal agencies.

Compensation for this position is $90,000 to $127,500 per year, commensurate with skills experience, for full-time equivalent work. We anticipate the position being funded for 12-14 months. Continued employment after that period is contingent on Grant Witness securing additional funding.

We are committed to being an equal opportunity employer. Review our Equal Employment Opportunity Statement for more information.

To Apply

Please apply via the form below (at https://grant-witness.us/apply.html if this advertisement is found elsewhere). You will be asked to upload a cover letter and a resumé or CV as a single PDF document with a filename of the format “FirstName_LastName.pdf”. Both the letter and resumé should be no more than two pages in length, for a total of four pages. Applications will receive an automated message of receipt. Only applicants selected for an interview will be contacted.

Please include in your application detail on your experience with and ability to support our technology stack or similar tooling. Applicants are encouraged to include links to code repositories, online portfolios, and other demonstrations of experience in their cover letter or CV, but public or open-source work is not required.