Junior Data Scientist

NIH-NCBI•Bethesda, MD

About The Position

Black Canyon Consulting (BCC) is searching for a Junior Data Scientist. This position supports research data analysis, dissemination, and scientific programming activities related to critical illness, infectious diseases, and related conditions of high national priority.

Requirements

Expertise in R or Python for statistical analysis and data manipulation
Experience using NLP techniques including named entity recognition, text classification, or information extraction to process data
Experience with LLM prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation, and LLM fine-tuning to extract structured information from unstructured data
Working knowledge of standard machine learning methods relevant to health data
Ability to critically evaluate AI/ML methods for appropriateness, bias, and validity in a clinical research context
Strong oral and written communication skills, including the ability to translate technical findings for clinical/non-technical collaborators
Ability to work collaboratively with physician and clinical subject matter experts
Detail-oriented, with strong data quality assurance habits
Strong analytical, organizational, and time-management abilities
Working knowledge of MS Office Suite
Working knowledge of SQL and relational database management systems (DBMS)

Nice To Haves

Experience with common NLP/ML libraries
Familiarity with clinical NLP tools or frameworks
Experience with vector databases or embedding-based retrieval for text/document search
Data visualization experience
Version control and documentation experience
Familiarity with administrative claims and/or EHR data
Prior experience in an academic, clinical, or biomedical research setting
Understanding of data privacy and regulatory requirements relevant to health data

Responsibilities

Design, implement, maintain, and optimize data pipelines, APIs, data transformation workflows, and supporting infrastructure.
Work with databases, data lakes, data warehouses, feature stores, and other data platforms to ensure information can be efficiently ingested, transformed, accessed, and used by analytical and AI-enabled systems.
Develop and maintain ETL/ELT processes, feature engineering workflows, and service layers that expose data or model endpoints to downstream systems and applications.