Data Scientist

Overview

Join ICF's India team as its first data scientist, identifying use cases and building proofs of concept that support data science and AI delivery for clients in the UK and EU.

What you'll do

• Meet colleagues across practice areas to understand their work, identify specific use cases and agree what a useful result would look like.
• Initially, scope and demonstrate focused proofs of concept, choosing suitable methods from statistical analysis and forecasting to machine learning and language models.
• Explain methods, limitations and potential value clearly to specialists and nontechnical colleagues, and use their feedback to improve the solution.
• Assess data quality, feasibility, privacy and delivery needs, and define the evidence needed to take a prototype further.
• As demand grows, design and deliver data science and AI solutions across projects with the wider team, from modelling and evaluation to integration, documentation and adoption.
• Contribute to proposals and client presentations.
• Establish reusable ways of working and help turn early demonstrations into a sustainable pipeline of well-defined client work.

What you'll need

• Hands-on experience in Python for analysis and modelling, including common data and machine learning libraries.
• Ability to use SQL to extract, join and check data.
• Sound grounding in statistics and machine learning, including regression or classification, forecasting, validation, baseline comparisons and appropriate performance measures.
• Practical familiarity with using large language models in analysis or prototyping, including prompting, checking outputs against evidence and recognising privacy, accuracy and reliability risks.
• Experience preparing imperfect data, building reproducible analyses and writing maintainable code with version control and testing.
• Ability to take an ambiguous question from discovery to a working demonstration, explain assumptions and uncertainty, and judge whether a solution is worth developing for operational use.
• Confidence working independently and engaging stakeholders across teams.
• Clear written and spoken English for technical and nontechnical audiences.
• A relevant degree or equivalent practical experience in a quantitative field.

Nice to have

• Experience in energy, utilities, climate or environmental policy, particularly applied analysis with domain experts.
• Experience in consulting, public policy research or client-facing delivery.
• Familiarity with cloud platforms, APIs, data pipelines or deployment.
• Experience building AI agents or applications that connect language models to data and tools, such as retrieval-based systems.

Details

• Location: New Delhi, India.