Senior data scientist

Description

Salary: £50-70k, dependent on experience

Come help us make government policy more transparent!

Overton is a young company with big ambitions to help the public, journalists and researchers see the evidence and influences behind real world policy, laws and regulations.

We think everybody benefits from policymaking being more open.

We launched last year and our platform already helps academics, funders and NGOs around the world track how their work translates into policy. It’s a database of millions of fulltext policy documents and their links to each other, to academic papers and to relevant people and topics, allowing analyses like this one which appeared in the journal Science.

We work with leading global universities, intergovernmental organisations and think tanks who find our existing service invaluable but are keen for us to provide more data, functionality and features to get the best possible answers to their questions.

That’s where you come in.

We’re looking for an enthusiastic and talented senior data scientist to join our small, dynamic team. This is an exciting opportunity to join us at a pivotal stage of our development, and to learn loads about developing a brand new product at an early stage start-up: you’ll have lots of opportunity to learn and grow, and you’ll be influencing the product and driving change from day one.

We need you to help with everything from prioritising and developing new product updates to finding new data sources, experimenting with new ways to enrich the data and maintaining our existing data pipelines.

You will be fluent in Python and have experience with web scraping, working with messy data, machine learning pipelines and data analysis & reporting. We’re primarily working with full text documents and with citation networks, so any experience in these areas is a plus! You should be familiar with NLP techniques like NER and topic modelling as well as different techniques for classification and clustering documents.

Initially this will be a very hands-on role, focusing on maintaining and growing the database, but we’ll want you to also take a key role in developing the product further and will need to develop a good understanding of our users. As the company grows, you will have the opportunity to take a more strategic role and hire other data scientists to support you.

It would be helpful, though not essential, if you have experience with data visualisation and front end development, familiarity with scholarly metadata, bibliometrics and/or knowledge of the academic, think tank or research impact space.

What you’ll be doing

• Taking overall responsibility for the quality, stability and growth of our document index
• Identifying, adding, organising and maintaining new data sources
• Conceptualising, prototyping and then implementing new ways to enrich our offering, through entity linking, summarisation, topic modelling, query translations and more
• Understanding customer use cases and suggesting product improvements
• Running our collaborations with academic researchers
• Finding interesting stories in the data to develop into blog posts, presentations and reports
• Creating custom reports for clients

About you

• 6+ years of experience
• Highly skilled in Python, knowledge of Javascript and PHP would be an advantage
• Familiarity with Postgres and Elasticsearch
• Experience of NLP techniques like NER and topic modelling, as well as more general classification and clustering tasks
• Full of ideas about how to improve the product
• Skilled at understanding user needs
• Keen to contribute to the growth ambitions of the company
• Enthusiastic and hard working
• Curious and always learning

This is a full-time permanent role based in London. We would like someone to be based at our Blackfriars office, at least part-time, but, for the right candidate we can be flexible on location/working pattern.

What you’ll get:

• £50-70k dependent on experience
• 6% employer pension contribution
• Enhanced family leave policies
• Supportive team and friendly work environment

If this sounds like your kind of thing, we’d love to hear from you! 

Apply with your CV and a non-generic cover letter that explains why you are right for this role and why it interests you. Send your application by email to jobs@overton.io

Deadline 31st October but we are reviewing applications on a rolling basis so please get in touch as soon as possible if you’re interested.

We welcome applications from candidates of all backgrounds, regardless of gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability or parental status. If you need any adjustments to allow you to fully participate in the application and interview process, please just let us know.

You must have the right to work in the UK, but if you already have an employer-sponsored UK visa we may still be able to consider your application – please discuss with jennifer@overton.io