Senior Data Scientist

Ignite IT Hub is seeking a Senior Data Scientist to improve the U.S. Census Bureau's LLM Autocoder and assess its use across household surveys and demographic projects. You will lead analytical methods and experimental design for coding survey write-in responses, working with engineers, the Model Evaluation Analyst, and Government subject matter experts (SMEs) to turn evidence into practical recommendations.

Responsibilities

• Establish performance baselines and evaluation methods for the American Community Survey (ACS) Autocoder and proposed expansion efforts.

• Analyze accuracy, industry and occupation joint coding rates, coverage, error patterns, and category-level results to identify improvement opportunities and regressions.

• Design reproducible experiments with representative samples, appropriate comparison groups, and controls against data leakage; explain uncertainty and limitations.

• Compare LLMs, fuzzy matching, direct-match dictionaries, rules, and hybrid approaches based on coding quality, explainability, feasibility, and operational cost.

• Assess data readiness and coding taxonomies for additional surveys and ACS fields, such as race and ancestry, field of degree, and language.

• Work with Government SMEs to resolve ambiguous cases and refine evaluation criteria; guide engineers on changes to prompts, preprocessing, model configuration, and coding methods.

• Interpret pilot and production results, recommend wh