Research Scientist VI, Step 4

Duties / Responsibilities

• Serve as the technical lead for end-to-end scientific data publication workflows, including data ingestion, curation, metadata enhancement, and quality assurance.
• Manage publication schedules, track workflow progress, resolve data readiness issues, and ensure timely release of datasets aligned with NASA program requirements.
• Explore improvements in data curation workflows and scientific metadata standards.
• Act as the primary liaison for Principal Investigators, data providers, and development teams. Provide expert guidance on data standards, submission protocols, and best practices for scientific data stewardship.
• Support improvements to data submission systems and user experience.
• Track and communicate data publication status, quality metrics, workflow performance indicators, and risk assessments to project and division leadership.
• Apply data science analytics to improve operational insight.
• Collaborate with system architects and developers to design and enhance cloud native scientific data systems supporting ingestion, validation, metadata management, and publication.
• Contribute to architectural decisions that improve scalability, reliability, and usability.
• Engage in cloud-based data engineering and scientific workflow automation.
• Prepare datasets for AI/ML applications, including vectorization, retrieval systems, analytics platforms, and model training pipelines.
• Conduct applied research and prototype emerging AI/ML approaches to improve scientific data discovery, access, and analysis.
• Explore AI for scientific data and ML-enabled data curation.

Minimum Requirements

• Master's degree in data science, informatics, and scientific data workflows, or a related field.
• Minimum of 9.5 years of full-time, verifiable work experience.
• Demonstrated experience in data curation, data stewardship, data lifecycle optimization, and metadata quality.
• Working knowledge of AI/ML models for curation, scientific data analytics, and cloud-based data systems.
• Excellent communication skills, including technical writing and formal presentations, with the ability to function within a collaborative, cross-disciplinary team.

Desired Qualifications

• PhD in data science, informatics, and scientific data workflows, or a related field, is desired.
• Familiarity with NASA Physical Sciences projects in one or more areas such as Fluid Physics, Materials Science, Biophysics, Combustion Science, Soft Matter, or Fundamental Physics will be an added advantage.
• Experience with physical science experimentation or laboratory workflows is a strong advantage.
• Experience in proposal development, technical writing, oral presentation, and communicating complex data concepts is desired.