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# Principal Data Scientist

- **Company:** Leonardo DRS
- **Location:** Germantown, MD, United States
- **Experience:** Expert
- **Salary:** $134,332.0 - $181,349.0
- **Contract:** Permanent contract
- **Skills:** Airflow, Data Analysis, Microsoft Azure, Data Transformation, Python (Programming Language), MATLAB, Machine Learning, SQL Databases, Delivery Pipeline, Apache Spark, Data Lineage, Data Pipelines, Databricks
- **Published:** August 10, 2026
- **Apply:** https://careers.leonardodrs.com/talentcommunity/apply/1403829800/?locale=en_US

## About the Role

* Master's degree in physical science or engineering discipline; PhD preferred
 * A minimum of 12 years of experience
 * Mastery of technologies and application domain
 * Expected to have knowledge and significant experience in multiple engineering disciplines
 * Must be a team player with good communication skills
 * Deep proficiency in Python for data analysis, preprocessing, and modeling
 * Strong foundation in applied statistics, analytics, and machine learning
 * Proven ability to set technical standards and mentor others, * Experience with anomaly detection, time-series analysis, and predictive monitoring.
 * Experience with data-pipeline and orchestration tooling (e.g., Airflow, Spark, SQL).
 * Exposure to geospatial and/or radar data concepts
 * Familiarity with Databricks and/or Azure
 * Experience building data-governance, lineage, or monitoring frameworks

U.S. Citizenship required. This position requires an active DOD security clearance or the ability to obtain such clearance within a reasonable time after commencement of employment.

## Description

* Own and build data-quality tooling, checks, and validation frameworks for time-series and geospatial datasets, ensuring datasets are ready for the ML training pipeline.
 * Lead classifier evaluation and validation. Define and apply rigorous metrics (precision/recall trade-offs, calibration, cross-validation, confusion-matrix and slice-based error analysis) and turn findings into concrete improvements.
 * Establish and enforce standards for data lineage, feature preparation (temporal alignment, resampling, lag features, spatial associations), and reproducibility.
 * Identify and resolve common ML data issues such as misaligned timestamps, invalid labels, class imbalance, and edge cases.
 * Learn and help refine our established model-training process; partner with the team to improve the end-to-end training pipeline.
 * Read, assess, and modernize legacy MATLAB tools; re-implementing in Python or other languages where it improves the process and results.
 * Mentor data engineers and scientists; document assumptions, methods, and limitations; and champion technical rigor across the team.
 * Provide briefings to customers, Senior Leadership, and internal stakeholders on capabilities and performance.
 * Able to work independently or lead small teams and drive projects to completion.
 * Work with customers to understand mission needs, review specifications and requirements, and develop solutions to best support them.
 * Provide budget, cost, and schedule input for design assignments.


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