HEO Data Scientist

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) works on issues that affect daily life across England. Our work covers the environment, farming, food production, rural communities, animal health and protection from natural risks such as flooding. The Farming Directorate is responsible for delivering a major part of the UK Governments programme of restoring nature, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, improving animal health and welfare as well as maintaining sustainable food production. By changing how government works and the offers we make available to farmers, we are:

• Improving productivity across the farming sector
• Re-purposing funding to focus on the environment
• Working with farmers to deliver the targets set out in the Climate Change and Environment Acts
We have an opportunity to join the Metrics and Reporting team within the Evidence and Analysis function. The team's work helps the directorate understand outcome progress, evidence decision-making and meet reporting requirements. The post holder will help to develop and maintain both internal reporting processes and external publications, including the Farming Sector Environmental Objectives and official statistics on the Farming Investment Fund (FIF). They will gain experience in programme evaluation, government statistics and work with modern analytical techniques, alongside data science and data engineering teams. This position would be suited to analytically-minded candidates interested in deriving robust, impactful analysis on directorate and environmental outcomes from real-world information. We recognise that people with protected characteristics may experience challenges in the job market and in career progression. We want to make sure that everyone has equal opportunities. Defra has many staff networks and trade unions that represent staff and help to positively change how we work. We support flexible working and want to ensure that our staff have a good work-life balance. We provide support for employees with disabilities and health conditions. If you need support at interview, please let us know so that we can provide this. We are keen to make our workforce as diverse as possible, and we hope to attract applications from underrepresented groups. You will:
• Use R programming language, with interest in further developing familiarity
• Carry out statistical analysis to extract insights from internal data
• Help develop and manage reproducible analytical pipelines for routine reporting and official statistics
• Conduct quality assurance on team analysis, such as code reviews
• Produce, manage and publish official statistics in line with the Code of Practice for Statistics
• Contribute to projects to gather insights into agri-environment scheme delivery and programme outcomes
• Contribute to an inclusive team by promoting equality, diversity, and inclusion