Description

Company

Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia

The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia is one of the 12 regional Reserve Banks that, together with the Board of Governors in Washington, D.C., make up the Federal Reserve System. It helps formulate and implement monetary policy, supervises banks and bank and savings and loan holding companies, and provides financial services to depository institutions and the federal government. The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia serves eastern and central Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey, and Delaware.

Job Summary:

The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia and its Consumer Finance Institute (CFI) seek a well-trained and motivated Senior Data Scientist (Sr. DS) to lead analytical, machine vision, and machine learning activities for a digitization center (DC) focused on the restoration of economic data.

The digitization center is a collaboration of the CFI and the Bank’s Research Department.

This newly established initiative will facilitate the exploration of a variety of current and historical topics in regional economics and consumer finance. The Sr. DS facilitates this mission by supporting and advising frontier research projects in the use of state-of-the-art technology and machine learning to convert natively unstructured data (information stored in books, images, and other undigitized formats) into ready-to-use digital data.

This position will report to the CFI Senior Manager, Data Science and Engineering.

What You Will Do:

The Sr. DS will digitize historical data sets (Census reports, special Census tabulations, deed books, realty directories and sales transactions logs, maps, etc.) as well as more recent data stored in non-open or unstructured formats (pdfs, print-only reports, earnings calls, interviews, etc.). Most projects will involve tabular or geospatial data, but some will require text to be structured to facilitate ML, search, and econometrics.

The Sr. DS will use modern cloud computing resources, including EMR/Spark, OpenSearch, various commercial ML-as-a-service providers - Hugging Face, Google Vision, and Amazon Textract - and advise senior staff on the use and acquisition of new techniques and services. Sr. DS will also use ML packages such as scikit-learn, scikit-image, OpenCV and TensorFlow to build custom models and techniques.

The Sr. DS will assist and mentor, as appropriate, junior staff in the digitization center, CFI, and research department. This position will coordinate project management across the digitization center’s projects. The Sr. DS will also work with vendors on label generation and data engineering projects.

This position affords many opportunities to develop knowledge of economics, markets, public policy, and empirical techniques. While this position is within the Consumer Finance Institute, the Sr. DS will have the opportunity to interact with a broad set of researchers and research areas across the Bank.

With sufficient experience and demonstrated skills, and with management approval, the Sr DS may pursue opportunities for co-authorship with a variety of Bank researchers and develop self-directed research projects on related topics.

What You Have:

Candidates should have 5 or more years of technical work experience in fields such as data science, data engineering, computer engineering or ML engineering. Alternatively, candidates should have a masters or PhD in computer science or a technical field such as engineering, math, physics, or economics.

Successful applicants will have applicable experience in several of the areas below and, preferably, familiarity with a subset of the remaining areas.

• Applied knowledge of Python or R including experience with standard data analysis, visualization, machine learning and image processing/vision packages
• Computer vision and/or OCR experience in an industry or advanced academic context considered particularly valuable.
• Distributed computing (Spark/EMR)
• Geospatial analysis interactively in ArcGIS/QGIS and programmatically in Python/R/GDAL
• Training and tuning ML models as well as working internally and with outside providers to generate labels
• OpenSearch/Elasticsearch
• Econometrics
• Familiarity working in a Linux environment
• SQL
• Git

To Apply:

Please upload a cover letter to explain your interest in the position and include your resume/vita. Also, include an official transcript and at least two references. A writing sample is preferred but not required.

About the Consumer Finance Institute:

Launched in 2017, the Consumer Finance Institute builds on decades of research experience at the Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank. The mission of this Bank-wide initiative is to produce leading-edge research on how credit markets and payment systems affect the economy. The CFI creates opportunities for scholars, the financial industry, and the public sector to collaborate and share insights on fostering healthy household finances, a stable financial system, and a resilient economy.

The primary staff of the CFI consists of 18 individuals, including seven Research Fellows. This group produces applied research on consumer finance topics, topical workshops led by regulators, academics, or industry experts, and larger conferences addressing particular questions or developments in the markets for consumer credit and payments. The staff also supports collaboration among researchers and analysts across the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.

Additional information about the CFI is found at: https://www.philadelphiafed.org/consumer-finance/about-the-consumer-finance-institute

The salary grade for this position is 16.

We offer a great benefits package that features:

• Medical (4 options), Prescription, Dental (3 options), and Vision Insurance with no waiting period
• 401k/Thrift Plan with generous employer match
• Employer-funded Pension Plan
• Paid Vacation/Sick Time & Holidays
• Monthly $100 Commuter Allowance
• Flexible Spending Accounts and Healthcare Spending Accounts
• Flexible Work Schedule available in most departments
• Life Insurance and Long Term Disability Insurance
• Tuition Reimbursement (undergraduate and graduate)
• Parental Leave
• Free onsite 24/7 Fitness Center including training classes, Peloton bikes and locker room / shower facilities
• Onsite Cafeteria & Coffee Shop
• Additional Convenience Benefits, Discounts and More...

Additional Information:

• The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia believes that diversity, equity and inclusion among our employees is essential to our success as an organization, and we want to recruit, develop and retain the most accomplished people from a diverse candidate pool. To support a workplace culture of belonging, we offer eight employee resource groups (ERGs) and a 100 percent rating on the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) Corporate Equality Index. The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace.
• We have eight employee resource groups (ERGs) to support a diverse workforce. Abilities (supporting disabilities and allies), African Heritage, Asian-Pacific, Freedom (supporting LQBTQ+ and allies), Talent Forward (supporting career growth), Women United, Working Families and Veterans. ERGs are open to all employees.
• We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodations to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform essential job responsibilities, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment.
• All Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia employees must comply with the Bank's ethics rules, which generally prohibit employees, their spouses/domestic partners, and minor children from owning securities, such as stock, of banks or savings associations or their affiliates, such as bank holding companies and savings and loan holding companies. If you or your spouse/domestic partner or minor child own such securities and would not be willing or able to divest them if you accepted an offer of Bank employment, you should raise this issue with the Recruiter for this posting, who can provide you contact information for our ethics officer if necessary. You should review the Bank's Employee Code of Conduct to ensure compliance with conflict of interest rules and personal investment restrictions.
• Background investigations and drug testing are required for all new hires as a condition of employment, after the job offer is made. Candidates for positions deemed as "safety sensitive" will also be screened for the presence of marijuana. Employment may not begin until the Bank accepts the results of the background investigation.
• All employees will be subject to FBI fingerprint / criminal background and Patriot Act/ Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) watch list checks at least once every five years.
• This position requires access to confidential supervisory information and/or FOMC information, which is limited to “Protected Individuals” as defined in the U.S. federal immigration law. Protected Individuals include, but are not limited to, U.S. citizens, U.S. nationals, and U.S. permanent residents who either are not yet eligible to apply for naturalization or who have applied for naturalization within the requisite timeframe. Candidates who are permanent residents must sign a declaration of intent to become a U.S. citizen when eligible to do so and pursue a path to citizenship. Candidates who are not U.S. citizens or U.S. permanent residents may be eligible for the information access required for this position if they sign a declaration of intent to become a permanent resident and a U.S. citizen and meet other eligibility requirements. In addition, all candidates must undergo an applicable background check and comply with all applicable information handling rules. Certain eligibility rules apply. You will provide work authorization to prove your eligibility to work in the United States.
• The above statements are intended to describe the general nature, level of work and the requirements of this position. They are not intended to be an exhaustive list of all responsibilities associated with this position or the personnel so classified. While this job description is intended to be an accurate reflection of this position, management reserves the right to revise this or any job description at its discretion at any time.
• This is not a 100% remote opportunity. You will be available to work on-site in at least a hybrid capacity.
• Learn more about the Philly Fed and its culture. Learn more about working for the Philly Fed.

#LI-Hybrid

Full Time / Part Time

Full time

Regular / Temporary

Regular

Job Exempt (Yes / No)

Yes

Job Category

Economics/Research

Work Shift

First (United States of America)

The Federal Reserve Banks believe that diversity and inclusion among our employees is critical to our success as an organization, and we seek to recruit, develop and retain the most talented people from a diverse candidate pool. The Federal Reserve Banks are committed to equal employment opportunity for employees and job applicants in compliance with applicable law and to an environment where employees are valued for their differences.

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