Senior Data Scientist (MNO Data)

Location: Fully remote; hiring is prioritized in Cameroon, Canada, Colombia, DRC, Germany, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Netherlands, Nigeria, Poland, Portugal, Rwanda, South Africa, Spain, Turkey, Uganda, United Kingdom, and United States. Substantial international travel of approximately 25–50% is required, sometimes at short notice.

Salary: United States base salary $107,070 annually; United Kingdom base salary £70,250 annually; Kenya base salary $72,550 annually. Target bonus is 10%; benefits stipends vary by country.

Company

hirify.global delivers direct cash assistance to people living in poverty and uses technology, quantitative measurement, and experimental research to improve aid effectiveness.

What you will do

• Extend analytical method templates for inferring residence, displacement, and poverty indicators from MNO data.
• Assess data quality, sparsity, and inferential limits for each operator, geography, and target area.
• Write technical specifications, pseudocode, tests, parameters, and validation criteria for operator data engineers.
• Guide operator engineering teams through implementation and run in-country workshops and statistical tuning.
• Design privacy-preserving analyses using aggregation, minimization, private set intersection, or homomorphic encryption where useful.
• Create internal training material and improve standard methods, data security processes, and technical understanding across hirify.global.

Requirements

• Strong mathematical modeling, machine learning, and statistics skills.
• Deep experience with spatio-temporal data, including temporal filtering, GIS, probability distributions, combinatorial reasoning, and sparse or irregular observations.
• Ability to reason without ground truth, set parameters from data distributions, and explain methodological trade-offs between accuracy and implementability.
• Excellent communication, writing, presentation, and relationship-building skills with engineers, data protection officers, leaders, and non-technical colleagues.
• Experience writing technical specifications that other teams implemented.
• Ability to read and review SQL and Python written by others and understand large data volumes and databases.
• Commitment to privacy by design and confidentiality when handling commercially sensitive partner data.
• Experience designing training material that changes how non-specialists use a data source.
• Comfort working in fast-moving contexts and travelling to fragile or post-disaster settings.
• English is required; alignment with hirify.global values and competencies including emotional intelligence, problem solving, project management, follow-through, and inclusivity is expected.

Nice to have

• Experience with Call Detail Records, latching data, mobility, transport, sensor, or remote-sensing data.
• Familiarity with private set intersection, secure multi-party computation, or homomorphic encryption.
• Experience with poverty modeling, survey data and instruments, mobile network operators, or open-source mobility estimation.
• French, Portuguese, Swahili, or Spanish language skills.

Culture & Benefits

• Candid, analytical, non-hierarchical culture with high ownership and early responsibility.
• Fully remote work with country-based compensation benchmarks and no salary negotiation.
• Target performance bonus of 10% and country-specific benefits stipend.
• Work supports direct poverty relief, rigorous impact evaluation, and international emergency response.
• Safeguarding, reference, criminal background, and sanctions checks may be conducted before hiring.
• Visa sponsorship is not available for employment in the United States or United Kingdom.