About Murmuration/What We Do

Murmuration is a political strategy organization that is transforming the politics of education so that every child can benefit from equal access to equitable and high-quality public schools.

We empower campaigns, advocates, and organizers to better engage and mobilize communities to demand improvements to the public education system. We advise and support our partners in their efforts to plan and execute successful, data-driven electoral, organizing, and advocacy campaigns so that together we can transform the politics of education. And we build political influence, craft strategies, leverage data, and develop technology that enable our partners to accelerate progress, particularly those in traditionally marginalized communities.

Who We Are

Our team includes experts and innovators in data, analytics, and strategy. We are former teachers, organizers, data scientists, nonprofit executives, political campaign veterans, and more - and we are looking for people whose passion and expertise can help improve our work and realize our vision.

Background

Murmuration’s role is to support organizations and communities through our political systems, to raise the profile of the issue of public education such that more Americans will prioritize the needs of our students, and to leverage politics to help to create the broader context in which those on the front lines with our children can thrive. We are focused on transforming the politics of education—partnering with organizations across the country committed to organizing parents and communities around the issues of public education and educational equity, electing to office and holding accountable local leaders who will make improving public K-12 schools a priority, and advocating for policy changes with the goal of improving outcomes for children. To do this, we believe that it is critical that all of the political stakeholders—electoral organizations, advocacy and organizing groups, charter associations, networks of schools, districts, elected officials, and voters—contribute to a strong and politically savvy education sector that works together toward a common vision of improving public education.

About the Position

We are looking for a creative and endlessly inquisitive Data Scientist to join our team. You are flexible and eager to contribute to a highly collaborative team. You will be working hand-in-hand with the Partnerships team and all of our Data Scientists to develop highly optimized predictive models from a large volume of regularly updated data and to design experiments to test the effectiveness of various campaign tactics. In addition, you will be a key resource for building out custom analytics to help analyze our partners’ work in the political organizing and advocacy spheres. You will be working in a small but dedicated, detail-oriented team that is committed to our mission. The Murmuration work environment is friendly, impact-driven, and highly collaborative.

Note: At Murmuration, we are committed to becoming an even more diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplace. To this end, all staff members are expected to sit on and actively participate in DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) subcommittees. These subcommittees work to ensure that DEI is embedded in everything we do.

Key Responsibilities

• Provide analytic insights and deliver data science products for our partners throughout the lifecycle of their campaign(s) by building and recommending custom models, providing analysis of campaign work, and producing post-campaign analytics to help our partners constantly learn from their efforts;
• Identify gaps in internal and external products that Data Science can help to build, and work cross-functionally to design, contribute, and/or lead the build of these products;
• Create predictive models using the latest machine learning algorithms on relatively “big” data;
• Explore data sets for insights that can help drive product improvements and feature prioritization;
• Contribute to the expansion and refinement of Murmuration proprietary codebase;
• Design and implement large-scale randomized controlled trials to gauge the general effectiveness of advocacy and campaign efforts;
• Learn to work collaboratively in a technical environment with the goal of building tools that are constantly evolving based on our needs; and
• Work closely with our partnerships team to identify and develop practical ways to apply our leading analytics to our partners’ problems.

Who You Are

The ideal candidate will have:

• An educational background and/or experience in political science, computer science, economics, mathematics, statistics or other related field (preferred);
• 3-4 years of work experience as a Data Scientist or data analyst, or a Master’s degree, or equivalent, in Data Science;
• Strong basic data science skills (data cleaning, munging, data analysis, and data visualization);
• Experience with scripting and general purpose programming languages (SQL, Python, or R);
• Experience data mining large datasets (familiarity with voterfile or Census data is a plus);
• Experience building and deploying machine learning models;
• Strong understanding of basic statistical techniques and how to apply them to a variety of real-world datasets;
• Strong problem-solving skills as well as the ability to effectively communicate findings and recommendations to non-technical audiences; and
• Interest in politics and/or educational policy.

Location, Compensation and Benefits

The Data Scientist is a full-time, salaried position with a comprehensive benefits package. It is based anywhere in the U.S. with location preferred in New York City. Minimum salary for this position is $120,000 but is commensurate with experience.

An Equal-Opportunity Employer with a Commitment to Diversity

Murmuration is proud to be an equal opportunity employer, and as an organization committed to diversity and the perspective of all voices, we consider applicants equally of race, gender, color, sexual orientation, religion, marital status, disability, political affiliation, and national origin. We reasonably accommodate staff members and/or applicants with disabilities, provided they are otherwise able to perform the essential functions of the job.