Centers of Excellence - Data & Analytics Specialist

Centers of Excellence (CoE) is hiring for GS-15 - Data & Analytics Specialist. This page contains information related to the role as well as a link to submit your application. Check out Join TTS Hiring Process to learn more about the application process.

Location: Washington, DC

Salary Range: The base salary range for this position is: GS-15 Step 1 - $142,701 to GS-15 Step 10 $170,800

The base salary range does not include any adjustment for locality. Your locality will be determined by where you live since most of our positions are remote. If the position isn’t remote, then your locality will be determined by the location of the office where the position is based.

You can find more information about this in the compensation and benefits section on our site.

For specific details on locality pay, please visit OPM’s Salaries & Wages page or for a salary calculator OPM’s 2020 General Schedule (GS) Salary Calculator.

Please note the maximum salary available for the GS pay system is $170,800

Note: You may not be eligible for the maximum salary as it is locality dependent. Please refer to the maximum pay for your locality.

Who May Apply: All United States citizens and nationals (residents of American Samoa and Swains Islands) and applicants must not be GSA employees or contractors

Role Summary:

Data & Analytics Specialist - GS-15

We are looking for a Data & Analytics Specialist to join the IT Modernization Centers of Excellence (COE) to help develop and improve the capabilities and services of our partner agencies.

The federal government has hundreds of thousands of data sets and managing that data is an extremely challenging task. As a Data & Analytics Specialist, you will help agencies liberate and embrace their data, equip them with profound insights drawn from that data, empowering them to more effectively fulfill their mission.

Data & Analytics Specialists should not be theoreticians, but rather practitioners and leaders in the craft of data science. You’ll need to be able to get hands on when necessary, but we lead government contractor teams to help partner agencies capitalize on their existing tools and resources. It’s imperative that our Data and Analytics Specialist is dedicated to results and has genuine passion about building a sustainable data infrastructure within government. We aspire to not only help our partners solve their problems efficiently and with the ability to scale, but also help them do it in an agile way.

Key Objectives

Key objective #1: You will lead cross-functional teams to help federal agencies implement or improve their capabilities to use quantitative and qualitative methods to collect, validate, analyze, and display customer feedback and performance data to aid service improvement and decision-making.

• Lead cross-functional teams to learn about the agency’s data needs within their existing systems to establish appropriate performance metrics and setting reasonable expectations for results
• Develop methods to monitor, evaluate, analyze, and report progress toward achieving performance goals and to inform continual improvements to service design and delivery
• Evaluate existing feedback and performance tools against best practices and agency requirements and make recommendations for new data-management tools and infrastructure
• Coordinate the implementation, deployment, troubleshooting and training for data analysis and reporting tools across the agency
• Conduct workshops with agency teams to identify uses of and promote understanding of their data sets

Key objective #2: You will promote the adoption of modern technology practices and strategies through teaching, coaching, and knowledge sharing.

• Practice and enthusiastically share agile methodologies throughout all stages of the project lifecycle
• Deliver educational workshops to accelerate learning and adoption of agile principles and practices
• Capture specific technology capabilities (e.g. strategies, roadmaps, playbooks) to document best practices across government
• Promote best practices for data governance (e.g. strategies, roadmaps, charters) and provide guidance for instituting enterprise-wide data governance as it aligns with organizational goals
• Inspire honesty and integrity through open communication and liberal knowledge sharing across a multi-disciplinary teams
• Create compelling case studies on how users are benefiting from the program, providing a special focus on lessons learned

Key objective #3: Practice an exceptional level of customer service with all partners, providing a unique, tailored experience.

• Explain product or services to people who have varying levels of technical knowledge — always meet the agency partner where they are
• Empathetically guide our agency partners through the bureaucracy of the sometimes long and arduous compliance and security processes
• Skillfully map specific inquiries to product capabilities, identifying the product that best meets the agency partner’s needs
• Serve as a liaison between the stakeholders and the project teams, delivering feedback to the team, enabling them to make necessary changes to product performance or presentation
• Support a safe, inclusive workplace and a positive team culture where all team members value diversity and individual differences

Basic Information

Location: Washington, DC

Salary Range: $142,701 to $170,800

If you are a new federal employee, your starting salary will likely be set at the Step 1 of the grade for which you are selected. Total compensation may include locality pay based on the individual’s duty location. For more salary information including locality pay details, please visit OPM’s Salaries & Wages page.

Who May Apply: All United States citizens and nationals (residents of American Samoa and Swains Islands) and applicants must not be GSA employees or contractors

Job announcement number: tbd

Opening and closing period for this job application: TBD EDT to TBD EDT

Job Title: Innovation Specialist

Series & Grade: 0301 - 15

Promotion Potential: GS-15

Number of vacancies: 2 (Additional vacancies may be filled from this announcement as needed)

Supervisory status: NO

Travel requirement: Occasional travel may be required up to 10%-20% per year

Security clearance: Public trust. Background investigation required.

Work Schedule: Full time

Appointment Type: Excepted Service: Not to exceed 24 months (2 years); may be extended for an additional 2 years for a maximum of 4 years total.

Job Summary

This is a Schedule A position under 5 CFR 213.3102(r) to hire unique technical skills to develop innovative digital tools and services in the Excepted Services, US Digital Service 18F Fellowship Program. The COE office is charged with developing innovative digital tools and services and uses lean startup and agile development principles to collaborate with other agencies to fix technical problems, build products, and improve how government serves the public through technology.

As an Innovation Specialist, the team member serves the government and makes an impact on a massive scale. The position requires that fellows perform work of an exceptional degree of difficulty across a wide range of topics at the convergence of technology, policy, and delivery. The incumbent leverages their experience deploying high quality, user centric platforms and services to lead major initiatives, consult on systems and policy proposal, and provide technical, policy, and programmatic guidance to government.

This position is located within the General Services Administration (GSA), Federal Acquisition Service (FAS), Technology Transformation Service (TTS), Office of COE.

GSA has been repeatedly named as one of the ‘Best Places to Work’ in the federal government. You will have access to many benefits including:

• Health insurance (choose from a wide range of plans)
• Life insurance coverage with several options
• Sick leave and vacation time, including 10 paid holidays per year
• Thrift Savings Plan (similar to a 401(k) plan)
• Flexible work schedules and telework
• Transit and child care subsidies
• Training and development
• Flexible spending accounts
• Long-term care insurance
• Training and development

Key Requirements

1. You must be a U.S. Citizen or National (residents of American Samoa and Swains Islands)
2. Suitable for federal employment, determined by a background investigation
3. You may be required to serve a trial period
4. Direct Deposit of salary check to financial organization required
5. Register with Selective Service, if you are required by https://www.sss.gov/Registration-Info/Who-Registration

Employment Requirements

• Serve a one year trial period, if required
• Undergo and pass a background investigation. You must be granted this clearance before you can start the job
• Have your identity and work status eligibility verified if you are not a GSA employee. We will use the Department of Homeland Security’s e-Verify system for this
• Any discrepancies must be resolved as a condition of continued employment
• Complete a financial disclosure report to verify that no conflict, or an appearance of conflict, exists between your financial interest and this position

Duties

Typical duties for the fellow include but are not limited to: Conceiving/recommending projects/studies to advance the state of the art in the specialty area; applying forward­ thinking design and development principles to product or services development, delivery and program management, such as lean startup, user­centered design, and agile development; Analyzing and scoping the technical and policy requirements needed to implement complex digital solutions; Assessing the state of digital services provided by the Federal Government, and working to align strategies and practice; conferring with key government/private officials and top experts in the field, representing the agency at technical symposia and/or conferences; Developing authoritative papers/reports; developing and leading adoption of government­wide standards for digital services, leading to their adoption across citizen and business­facing government services; Demonstrating thought leadership and contributing best practices in a variety of technologies and principles; Contributing to a talent strategy that includes recruiting innovators and entrepreneurs to participate in solving complex and esoteric challenges.

Evaluation

We will use a method called Category Rating to assess your application.

Here’s how it will work:

You will be scored based on a review of your application materials, measuring your possession of each of the following competencies

• Analytics Technical Fluency: The ability to assimilate, synthesize and leverage highly technical data to drive decision making and effectively communicate that information to audiences with a wide range of technical expertise
• Leadership: Ability to effectively inspire and lead cross-functional teams to meet the project vision and shared objectives of agency partner organizations, while simultaneously providing support and guidance to all members of the partner agency
• Agile Orientation: Ability to apply agile methodologies to deliver work in a frequent and iterative fashion to address user needs
• Communication: Communicate effectively with a variety of audiences, particularly in consulting scenarios, to establish a shared vision and understanding of a project’s technical implementation, objectives and goals
• TTS Core Values Alignment: Working with integrity, transparency and resiliency in civic minded or high impact environment

If found to be eligible and at least minimally qualified for the position, your score will be used to place you in a category (Best Qualified, Well Qualified, or Qualified).

If your resume does not support your possession of the competencies listed above, we may lower your score, which could place you in a lower category.

Within each category, veterans will receive selection priority over non-veterans if supported by appropriate documentation.

Qualifications

All applications will be reviewed by a panel of subject matter experts against a scoring rubric created for this role. In order to properly be able to evaluate your previous experience, we recommend being as detailed as possible in your resume and following our general guidance on creating federal style resume.

To qualify for this role, you must have one year of specialized experience equivalent to the GS-14 grade level in the Federal service. Specialized experience is:

1. Experience helping clients collect and manage their data as a practitioner in the craft of data science. This experience must include ALL of the following:
   • Analyzing large data sets using statistical packages (e.g. Python, R, SAS, SQL, etc.)
   • Implementing data warehousing solutions (e.g. Teradata, Oracle, Amazon Web Services)
   • Developing reports using business intelligence tools (e.g. Tableau, Power BI, MicroStrategy etc.)
   • Developing queries for complex relational databases and disparate data systems
   • Developing advanced analytics solutions (e.g. predictive modeling, artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing)
2. Experience leading, communicating, and developing deliverables for large technical projects. This experience must include ALL of the following:
   • Developing project management documentation (e.g. scopes of work, project plans, status reports)
   • Briefing executive level stakeholders on project information (e.g. status, technical details, blockers, dependencies)
   • Developing data visualizations for stakeholders
3. Experience using quantitative and qualitative methods to collect, validate, analyze, and display data to aid service improvement and decision-making in projects or organizational contexts. This experience must include THREE of the following:
   • Providing guidance on the selection or implementation of data analytics technologies
   • Creating analytical methodologies for large data sets (e.g., data mining)
   • Developing KPIs or outcomes oriented frameworks
   • Standardizing or transforming a variety of data sets
   • Documenting and promoting data governance and analysis best practices
4. Experience navigating highly ambiguous or uncertain situations to deliver results for clients. This experience must include ALL of the following:
   • Coaching clients or stakeholders through the adoption of human centered design
   • Communicating technical information to people with varying levels of technical knowledge
   • Serving as a liaison between stakeholders or clients and project teams

Qualification determinations cannot be made when resumes do not include the required information, so failure to provide this information may result in disqualification.

For each job on your resume, provide:

• the exact dates you held each job (from month/year to month/year or “present”)
• number of hours per week you worked (if part time)