Data Scientist Journeyman

AM Pierce and Associates•Patuxent River, MD

22h•Hybrid

About The Position

AM Pierce is seeking a Data Scientist specializing in autonomy performance, safety, characterization, and decision analytics to design, develop, and manage the end-to-end analytical pipeline supporting the evaluation of advanced autonomous systems. This position will transform large volumes of simulation, test, mission, and system-performance data into defensible technical conclusions about how autonomous systems perform, how reliably and safely they operate, where their limitations exist, and whether demonstrated performance supports engineering and acquisition decisions. The successful candidate will own the analytical process from data definition and instrumentation through ingestion, processing, statistical analysis, visualization, interpretation, and executive-level presentation. This is not primarily a dashboard-development or reporting position. The individual must be capable of developing the analytical methods used to characterize autonomous-system behavior and translating technically complex results into clear, defensible conclusions for audiences ranging from engineers and scientists to Navy Captains, acquisition leadership, and Flag Officers.

Requirements

Active Secret clearance with ability to obtain Top Secret.
Bachelor's degree (four-year degree) in Systems Engineering, Computer Science, Mathematics, Physics, or a related technical field.
Minimum of 5 (five) years of professional experience in data science, analytics, modeling and simulation, test and evaluation, complex-system characterization, or related technical disciplines.
Demonstrate ability to independently design and implement an end-to-end analytical pipeline.
Advanced proficiency with Python and common scientific/data-analysis libraries such as NumPy, pandas, SciPy, scikit-learn, and related tools.
Strong knowledge of statistical analysis and experimental design.
Experience analyzing large, multidimensional datasets.
Experience developing meaningful performance metrics from complex system data.
Experience with data visualization and communicating quantitative results.
Ability to translate ambiguous operational or engineering questions into measurable analytical problems.
Ability to work directly with software engineers, autonomy engineers, test engineers, operators, scientists, and acquisition professionals.
Excellent written and verbal technical communication skills.
Demonstrate ability to communicate sophisticated quantitative results to both highly technical and non-technical senior audiences.

Nice To Haves

Experience working with military simulation and test environments is highly desirable.
Familiarity with AFSIM, JSE, MATLAB, distributed computing, cloud/HPC environments, or similar analytical and modeling environments is beneficial.
Experience supporting the U.S. Navy, NAVAIR, NAWCAD, DoD/DoW acquisition organizations, operational test organizations, or defense research organizations is highly desirable.

Responsibilities

Develop analytical approaches for evaluating autonomous software and autonomous-system performance across controlled simulation, software-in-the-loop, hardware-in-the-loop, and operationally representative test environments.
Develop quantitative approaches for assessing autonomy safety and operational risk.
Analyze safety-critical behaviors, including constraint violations, separation, boundary compliance, unsafe states, decision timing, recovery behavior, and other mission-specific safety measures.
Work with autonomy engineers, test engineers, operators, and scientists to design experiments capable of answering specific technical and acquisition questions.
Develop software and analytical tools for processing high-volume autonomy and simulation telemetry.
Create reusable analytical libraries and frameworks rather than one-off analyses.