Operational Research/Data Scientist

Unissant, Inc. delivers innovative capabilities to the agencies that keep our nation healthy and safe. We apply our domain expertise, data acumen, and technology know-how to achieve breakthrough results for our clients. Working collaboratively, we advance missions and careers through a focus on honesty, integrity, and dependability. We continuously look for talent, excited to join that effort. To learn more about our exciting organization, please visit us at . We are seeking a Senior Data Scientist to join our team in Washington, DC, in support of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Law Enforcement Systems and Analysis (LESA) program within the Statistical Tracking Unit (STU). The STU is the official statistical reporting unit for ICE, responsible for ensuring accountability, consistency, and efficiency in the statistical reporting of ICE operations. STU supports analysis of key performance metrics, provides ad hoc analysis and reporting for congressional inquiries, interagency requests, litigation, and FOIA, and assesses and improves reporting tools including the ICE Integrated Decision Support System (IIDS) and ENFORCE. The ideal candidate is a data scientist with strong predictive modeling, feature engineering, and model evaluation skills, with particular ability to support official reporting workflows, data quality monitoring, and business requirements development in a high-accountability government environment. In addition, the ideal candidate brings substantial experience in operations research (OR) methods and federal environments and is able to apply OR techniques to enforcement and immigration lifecycle problems. Essential Duties and Responsibilities: • Develop and implement predictive modeling and machine learning solutions to support STU statistical reporting, data quality monitoring, and enforcement analysis within the immigration lifecycle. • Perform feature engineering: identifying, constructing, and selecting relevant variables from structured and unstructured data in ICE systems of record (ENFORCE, IIDS, and related databases) to optimize model and report performance. • Design and execute comprehensive model evaluation and validation frameworks including cross-validation, A/B testing, precision/recall analysis, and population/filter validation per STU standard operating procedures. • Provide data quality monitoring: analyze data to identify patterns, data quality issues, and anomalies; document findings and provide recommendations to federal staff in writing. • Complete a "Weekly Population Report Validation" process: validate all standard populations and filters in systems of record by the first business day of each week; communicate data quality issues to federal staff by 3:00 PM EST on the first business day of each week. • Gather business requirements, design, and execute recurring and ad-hoc reports from databases of record at prescribed frequencies for federal staff review; conduct peer reviews of deliverables daily or as requested. • Gather business requirements and draft reporting methodologies; participate in the testing and validation of business rule implementations; provide final training documentation as directed by the STU Unit Chief. • Identify data resources, research historical data, integrate structured and unstructured data from disparate sources, and incorporate new data from systems as required. • Support EOFY (End of Fiscal Year) Management: conduct population audits, validate fiscal year reports, identify data quality issues, and draft updated methodologies for new fiscal year reporting. • Co-lead STU working groups (including the STU Database Working Group); identify gaps for LESA business tool development; draft technical requirements for ITM; provide UAT and validation of implementations. • Evaluate and provide recommendations for current and emerging business tools: SQL, AI, Tableau, GIS, Python, QLIK, Databricks; support FOIA and l