Data Scientist

Summary

Join the Democratic National Committee’s Tech Team as a Data Scientist to build, evaluate, and optimize predictive models. You will be a subject matter expert, collaborating with Product Managers, Engineers, and Analytics Engineers. The role involves all stages of data science pipelines, from data sourcing and cleaning to applying statistical methods. You will audit and improve existing products and pipelines, build new predictive models for voter outreach, and collaborate with engineers and analysts. Additionally, you may evaluate vendor models, improve record linkage tooling, and increase model fairness and transparency. This is a high-impact, fully remote position focused on both short-term results for the 2026 election cycle and long-range development of products for the progressive ecosystem.

Requirements

• You have experience doing data science or statistics in a social sciences or business context, which may include electoral politics
• You code comfortably in R or Python and SQL
• You have experience with predictive modeling, record linkage methods, and/or experiment design
• You have strong written and verbal communication skills, and experience explaining technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences. You won’t just be building data science products, but you’ll be helping us ensure our diverse users trust them and know how to use them for their individual needs
• You are comfortable with building but also maintaining. We often need to move quickly and with agility to meet campaign deadlines, and sometimes you’ll need to leverage what’s been created already to get products to users when they need them most
• You are curious, collaborative, and humble – ready to work with a diverse, distributed team to solve interesting problems together

Responsibilities

• Audit and improve our existing data science products and pipelines. Help us continue building upon and improving our models, the pipelines that produce them, and other data science products we provide
• Build new predictive models for more efficient voter outreach. In cases where a new model is needed, help leverage our existing data and identify new data sources to create new and better predictions
• Collaborate with engineers and analysts to deliver results. Partner across functions to deliver timely and high quality data products to our users
• Promote tech team cultural values. Promote and embody an empathetic, kind, and collaborative workplace where people can do their best work to elect more Democrats. Encourage learning both within data science and cross-functionally, fostering an environment of growth and curiosity
• Evaluate vendor-provided models for purchase. Where we do not have sufficient resources to build models in-house, drive validation and evaluation of vendor models to meet user needs. Empower DNC tech team leadership with the technical understanding and context to make balanced build vs. buy decisions
• Improve and extend our internal record linkage tooling to build a fuller picture of voters. Help us maintain a premier voter file and help campaigns identify the impact of their programs through probabilistic matching
• Increase fairness, accountability and transparency in our models. Ensure we are empowering users with the right training and documentation to leverage our data products to the greatest effect

Preferred Qualifications

• Have experience working in modern cloud data environments (GCP, BigQuery, Airflow, dbt, etc.)
• Have experience working with political data like state voter files, election results, or data on voter, volunteer, or donor engagement and/or the DNC’s data and analytics tools, including experience doing analysis in our BigQuery-based data warehouse (Phoenix) or exposure to political CRMs (e.g. VoteBuilder, NGP VAN, BSD)
• Have experience using cloud computing platforms and their ML services (such as BigQuery ML/Vertex AI on GCP, Sagemaker on AWS, or Azure) or using machine learning infrastructure built on open-source tools (e.g. MLflow or Tensorflow)
• Understand the role data can play in political program planning; you think of analysis through the lens of the decisions it will inform, and are deeply focused on asking the right questions before you dive into the weeds of any particular analysis

Benefits

• Generous paid time off, including federal holidays and open leave
• Health and dental insurance for employee and dependents; 90% paid by the DNC, 10% paid by employee
• Supplementary vision plans available to employees for purchase
• Up to a 5% employer match DNC 401(k) plan
• Pre-tax flexible spending account benefits available to employees and dependents