Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Priorities USA runs digital voter mobilization and persuasion campaigns and develops data-driven tools for progressive causes. The Data Scientist contractor will support R&D by prototyping, evaluating, and implementing analytical methods, LLM applications, datasets, pipelines, and software for digital campaigns.
Responsibilities
- Explore, prototype, and validate new analytical methods and LLM applications across a range of political, media, and advertising data contexts
- Build proof-of-concept tools, features, and datasets, and iterate on them based on feedback from digital practitioners
- Engineer validated methods into modular, sturdy, well-documented pipelines and applications that are ready to graduate into production systems
- Develop software primarily through agentic development workflows, producing well-specified, reviewable, tested, and documented code
- Think critically about what data is saying and communicate findings, tradeoffs, and recommendations clearly to technical and non-technical audiences
Skills
- Strong programming skills in SQL and Python
- Demonstrated ability to apply statistical and data science methods in real-world contexts
- Strong software engineering habits (version control, code review, testing, documentation)
- Hands-on experience applying LLMs in real projects — e.g., prompt and context engineering, classification or extraction pipelines, evaluation of model outputs, or agentic frameworks
- Experience working with agentic software development tools (e.g., Cursor, Claude Code, Codex)
- Experience working with GCP (and preferably AWS), including building and maintaining data pipelines
- Experience using git + GitHub
- Familiarity with cybersecurity best practices
- Strong communication skills and the ability to collaborate across teams with different working styles and levels of technical experience
- Demonstrated curiosity and self-directed exploration through side projects, prototypes, experiments, or other evidence that you build and try things on your own initiative
- Experience communicating with diverse groups, working in a multicultural workforce, and bringing a sensitivity and appreciation of cultural differences
- Contractors must be based in the United States
- We expect availability for regular check-ins during Eastern Time business hours
- Experience working with digital advertising, media performance, social listening, or media consumption data
- Experience working with political, advocacy, or campaign data such as voter files
- Experience with containerization and orchestration
- Experience developing front-end applications or dashboards
- Experience building evaluation frameworks or benchmarks for LLM or ML systems
Benefits
- Remote engagement
- Compensated take-home exercise
Company Overview