The New York City Department of Correction (DOC) is an integral part of the City’s evolving criminal justice system, participating in reform initiatives and strategies aimed to move the City towards a smaller jail system without compromising public safety. The DOC is responsible for maintaining a safe and secure environment for our employees, visitors, volunteers, and people in our custody. Importantly, safe jails enable DOC to provide people in custody with the tools and opportunities they need to successfully re-enter their communities. The DOC operates facilities and court commands across the five boroughs with more than 7,500 diverse professionals and knowledgeable experts.

The Operations Research Team is tasked with improving the systems and processes within the Department of Correction, with a focus on decreasing violence, optimizing systems, and identifying efficiencies that support meeting minimum standards for those in our care, and decreasing operating costs. It’s a small team, with an outsized impact, offering growth opportunities for the right candidate. The current team includes specialists with quantitative backgrounds in various mathematical and data-related fields that leverage data-driven approaches to accomplish these goals. Reporting directly to the Director of Operations Research, the successful candidate for this position will be able to contribute to a wide variety of impactful projects.

The ideal candidate will be able to perform a wide variety of job duties, including but not limited to:

- Engage with internal stakeholders to obtain information about the department’s operations.
- Research and engage with external stakeholders to discuss best practices.
- Identify innovative solutions to support optimizing agency processes.
- Conduct field investigations to support the team’s work and departmental initiatives.
- Proactively meet with internal stakeholders to address and improve systematic systems.
- Perform data exploration, preprocessing, and transformation of large datasets to extract
insights and prepare them for modeling.
- Create new features and optimize existing ones to improve the performance of
violence prediction models.
- Develop, implement, and maintain machine learning models focused on violence prediction.
- Evaluate models, create pipelines, and deploy/monitor models.
- Document models and be able to present said models to a variety of audiences.
- Assist with other data science-related projects as needed.
- Support department pilots by working on data-related tasks.
- Work on special projects and other related tasks as needed.

1. For Assignment Level I (only physical, biological and environmental sciences and public health) A master's degree from an accredited college or university with a specialization in an appropriate field of physical, biological or environmental science or in public health.
To be appointed to Assignment Level II and above, candidates must have:
1. A doctorate degree from an accredited college or university with specialization in an appropriate field of physical, biological, environmental or social science and one year of full-time experience in a responsible supervisory, administrative or research capacity in the appropriate field of specialization; or
2. A master's degree from an accredited college or university with specialization in an appropriate field of physical, biological, environmental or social science and three years of responsible full-time research experience in the appropriate field of specialization; or
3. Education and/or experience which is equivalent to "1" or "2" above. However, all candidates must have at least a master's degree in an appropriate field of specialization and at least two years of experience described in "2" above. Two years as a City Research Scientist Level I can be substituted for the experience required in "1" and "2" above.

NOTE:
Probationary Period
Appointments to this position are subject to a minimum probationary period of one year.

- Interest in working in a criminal justice field - Excellent communication and writing skills - 3+ years of experience working in a data science (or related) role - Flexible to work after business hours - Familiarity with machine learning and deep learning (especially graph neural networks) - Proficient in Python and SQL - Familiarity with Python web application frameworks (dash, streamlit, flask) - Proficient in MS Excel, PowerPoint and Word - Proficient in creating LaTeX documents - Proficient in Tableau or other Business Intelligence tools - Excellent writing, communication, analytic, research skills and ability to be detailed oriented - Ability to establish positive working relationships with multiple units and different levels of staff - Ability and willingness to take initiative and work collaboratively.

As a prospective employee of the City of New York, you may be eligible for federal loan forgiveness programs and state repayment assistance programs. For more information, please visit the U.S. Department of Education’s website at https://studentaid.gov/pslf/.

New York City residency is generally required within 90 days of appointment. However, City Employees in certain titles who have worked for the City for 2 continuous years may also be eligible to reside in Nassau, Suffolk, Putnam, Westchester, Rockland, or Orange County. To determine if the residency requirement applies to you, please discuss with the agency representative at the time of interview.

The City of New York is an inclusive equal opportunity employer committed to recruiting and retaining a diverse workforce and providing a work environment that is free from discrimination and harassment based upon any legally protected status or protected characteristic, including but not limited to an individual's sex, race, color, ethnicity, national origin, age, religion, disability, sexual orientation, veteran status, gender identity, or pregnancy.