Optimal Solutions Group, LLC (Optimal) is a policy research and data analytics firm that conducts studies and provides technical assistance on entrepreneurship and innovation, education, workforce development, economic development, health care, and related subjects. Our mission is to provide decision makers with rigorous and timely insights that enable our clients to improve public well-being.

General Description:

• Assist data scientists, senior researchers, and software developers by bridging the gap between research and analytics in collaboratively conducting evidence-based research and developing data-driven solutions across multiple policy areas. 

• Work with research and analytics staff in development of streamlined protocols through gathering requirements.

• Develop schema, business rules and configuration testing processes. 
• Direct the development of standardized protocols to manipulate information captured in a fixed format to usable data, using non-traditional data sources like scraping data from social media, mining data from natural language texts, as well as vectorizing images to create analytical dataset to inform policy decisions.
• Assist data scientists and senior researchers in implementing complex statistical models, machine learning algorithms and deep learning networks to answer research questions, identify patterns and trends, reduce dimensionality of data and select meaningful features, as well as conduct predictive analysis. 

Work experience and job skills requirements:

• Knowledge of machine learning techniques and algorithms, such as k-NN, Naive Bayes, SVM, and Decision Forests

• Experience using data science toolkits, such as R, , , MatLab, Python, and neural network frameworks such as Torch, Keras, Café, and Tensorfow. 
• Experience using data visualization tools, such as D3.js, GGplot, PlotLy, Microsoft Power BI, and Tableau.
• Requirements gathering experience in developing schema, business rules, and test protocols. 
• Experience conducting tests for configuring and developing integrated data systems. 
• Experience working with query languages such as SQL. 
• Excellent knowledge of statistics and research methods and experience developing regression models.
• Experience developing technical documentation for datasets, code, and data products. 
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills. 

Education Requirements: Bachelor’s degree with minimum two years of experience or master’s degree in data science, Business Analytics, Economics, Applied Mathematics, Applied Statistics, Operations Research, or a related field.