Senior / Staff Data Scientist (HHS)

About Skylight

Skylight is a digital consultancy using design and technology to help government agencies deliver better public services. We’re at the forefront of a civic movement to reinvent how all levels of government serve families, patients, and many others in today's digital world.

If you want to play a part in driving this critical movement forward, we’d love for you to join our growing team of public interest technologists. The work we do matters.

About the job

At Skylight, data scientists transform complex data into insights that drive better public services. In this role, you’ll play a key part in a major modernization effort at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). You’ll collaborate with colleagues in product, design, engineering, security, and data engineering to deliver production-ready analytics and machine learning solutions that are secure, explainable, and easy to use. And your impact will extend well beyond delivery — you’ll establish practices, documentation, and tools that empower federal teams to maintain and scale these capabilities into the future.

What you’ll do

• Identify high‑value questions, design experiments, and ship production‑ready analytics and machine learning solutions with clear measures of impact
• Build reliable workflows for data prep, feature engineering, evaluation, and monitoring, partnering with data engineers to integrate models into pipelines and applications
• Apply responsible AI practices — privacy, security, fairness, and explainability — and document choices with model cards and decision records
• Translate findings into decisions through narratives, dashboards, and accessible visualizations
• Mentor teammates, write clear documentation, and enable federal partners with playbooks and training so capabilities grow over time

What we're looking for

Minimum qualifications

Nice-to-have qualifications

Don’t meet 100% of the criteria but think you can do the job? We’d love to chat anyway! We’re on a mission to build diverse teams, and studies have shown that women and marginalized folks are less likely to apply to jobs if they don’t check every box.

Other requirements

Position type

This is a full-time, exempt position.

Location

This is a remote-friendly role. You can be based anywhere in the U.S. Candidates in the Washington, DC area, or those willing to travel there periodically for in-person collaboration, are especially encouraged to apply.

Care package

Salary

We want to give you the most competitive salary possible. After all, you deserve it! To that end, we use the results of our interview process to determine what salary is most appropriate given your current level of seniority. For a Data Scientist at Skylight, the current salary ranges are as follows :

Benefits

Your well-being is important to us, so we focus on supporting you in a variety of ways :

Interview tips

We want you to have a great interview experience with us! Here are some tips to help you prepare for a successful interview :

We participate in E-Verify and upon hire, will provide the federal government with your Form I-9 information to confirm that you’re authorized to work in the U.S.

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, national origin, sex, religion, age, disability, veteran status, or any other category protected by applicable law.