Data Scientist
HYBRID (1 - 2 days/week in the Holborn office)

Times Higher Education is the data provider underpinning university excellence in every continent across the world. As the company behind the world’s most influential university ranking, and with almost five decades of experience as a source of analysis and insight on higher education, we have unparalleled expertise on the trends underpinning university performance globally. Our data and benchmarking tools are used by many of the world’s most prestigious universities to help them achieve their strategic goals and our events series act as the home of higher education thought leadership around the world.

Role context

The data team at Times Higher Education work with university data to produce ad-hoc and ongoing analyses, including university rankings.

All projects include data gathering, validation, processing and output stages; this role would cover all stages, in close collaboration with more senior team members.

The data scientist will provide support across our team for the production of our core and secondary rankings, including running QA on our data inputs, processing survey results and supporting other teams in understanding our results.

This is a role that would suit a hands-on data scientist (or data analyst with some strong python and SQL skills) who can become proficient quickly with our systems and domain.

The ideal candidate will have a keen interest in data wrangling and analytics, and be highly collaborative.

Responsibilities

• Work with Senior Data Scientist to support the production of core and secondary rankings. This includes:
  • Writing and maintaining data processing codebase (python)
  • Running data quality analysis and develop further QA processes
  • Suggesting in-depth analyses of the results to be disseminated through products, presentations, articles, press releases etc.
  • Developing further statistical review of the data to support the rankings’ evolution over time
• Support Senior Data Scientist in the delivery of data consultancy projects. This includes:
  • Review and maintain codebase and ETL pipeline to deliver data to non-technical teams (python, Excel)
  • Develop skills to build up on advanced bibliometrics analyses (Databricks, python)
  • Work with our subject matter experts and consultants to develop new scalable and reproducible analyses for the HE sector
• Work with Data Engineer to disseminate results of data projects (rankings and others). This includes:
  • Work with our Product team to develop new external-facing analyses and dashboards
  • Provide ad-hoc analytical insights to other THE teams, querying our core university performance data (SQL)

Experience

• Implementing data QA pipelines to ensure validity of inputs and processes
• Working with real-world (external) data (as opposed to company-internal analytics)
• Producing high-level stats and analyses as well as in-depth, explanatory analyses on the data
• Delivering data analyses to external stakeholders, including technical and non-technical audiences
• Ownership of data stream or project and experience working with project manager to build clear delivery plan
• Providing data expertise as part of analytical projects with complex deliverables
• Close collaboration with other technical data practitioners as part of multi-step projects
  

Essential skills

• Statistics / Mathematical foundations of data modelling (incl. a good understanding of data distributions and how this impacts analytical outputs)
• Strong python skills (incl. data wrangling in pandas, modular programming, use of common code repositories…)
• GitHub data management
• Data governance and documentation
• Good SQL skills (joins, advanced data manipulation, subqueries, CTEs…)
• Data wrangling (how to structure data exploration vs production code, best practice and optimal formats…)
• Advanced Excel skills
• Excellent attention to detail and a robust approach to error-identification and debugging
• Strong time-management skills, able to juggle long-term projects and shorter-term requests
• Knowledge of data visualisation best practice, and an ability to present complex processes and data insights clearly
  

Desirable

• AWS
• Tableau
• Knowledge of higher education data
• Familiarity with performance assessment frameworks
• Experience with survey design and/or data (incl. quality control)
• Entity recognition and/or free-text matching
• Public speaking
  

You do You
You do You. With colleagues located around the world, we know that our individuality and diversity of experiences are our greatest strengths. That’s why we want THE to be a place where you are welcome to be who you want to be at work; where you can share whatever part of your life or self-identity you want, without obligation or facing discrimination; and where all abilities and perspectives are recognised and accommodated.