Data Scientist (Evaluation)

At the World Bank, a member of the World Bank Group (WBG), you’ll join a diverse, global community working across cultures, disciplines, and borders to address the world’s most pressing development challenges. With 1.2 billion young people reaching working age in the decade ahead, the challenge of job creation has never been greater. Through partnerships across 145 countries and more than 182 offices worldwide, we work with governments, private sector, development partners and other stakeholders to invest in people, strengthen markets, and deliver scalable, data-driven solutions that generate more and better jobs and improve lives. For more information, visit International Bank for Reconstruction and Development The Global Environment Facility (GEF) is a financial mechanism that provides grants and concessional funds to recipient countries for projects and activities to protect the global environment. The governance structure of the GEF includes an Assembly, a Council, a Secretariat, a Scientific and Technical Advisory Panel and an Independent Evaluation Office (IEO). Projects financed by the GEF are implemented by eighteen GEF Agencies. The IEO is functionally independent of, but administratively supported by, the World Bank. It is independent from the CEO of the GEF and reports directly to the GEF Council. The GEF Council authorizes IEO’s four-year rolling work plans, approves annual budgets and receives all evaluation reports (www.gefieo.org). The IEO has the central role of ensuring the independent evaluation function within the GEF; of setting minimum requirements for evaluation; of ensuring oversight of the quality of evaluation systems at program and project level; and of sharing evaluative evidence within the GEF. The IEO has the responsibility for undertaking independent evaluations, typically on a strategic level, including work across specific themes, programs or country clusters. The GEF IEO is based in Washington, DC. All positions in the Office are World Bank Group appointments. More information about the IEO can be found at Office’s website https://www.gefieo.org Duties Accountabilities: • Lead the development, management, integration, and analysis of complex datasets from multiple internal and external sources to support IEO evaluations and analytical work. Develop robust, reproducible, and maintainable code, analytical pipelines, and data systems, ensuring appropriate standards for data quality and documentation. • Design and apply artificial intelligence and advanced data-science approaches to extract, process, integrate, and analyze information from large and heterogeneous sources, including reports and other published and unpublished documents, administrative data, metadata, geospatial information, and other structured and unstructured sources. Translate evaluation questions into appropriate computational approaches and assess the robustness and limitations of the resulting evidence. • Develop, test, and adapt state-of-the-art machine learning and AI techniques to the analytical requirements of IEO and the GEF. Lead experimentation with approaches that integrate multiple sources and data types, including text, satellite imagery, geospatial data, and geo-referenced socioeconomic and environmental databases, and assess their potential for application across evaluations. • Provide substantive methodological and technical inputs to IEO evaluations, identifying opportunities where AI, machine learning, geospatial analysis, and other data-science methods can strengthen evaluation design, evidence collection, triangulation, and analysis. Work with evaluation teams to ensure that advanced methods respond to evaluation questions and that results are appropriately interpreted within their institutional, socioeconomic, and environmental contexts. • Establish and maintain effective working relationships with data producers, curators, engineers, researchers, and technical partners within and outside the GEF and World Bank Group. Represent IEO in relevant technical exchanges and communities of practice and identify opportunities for collaboration, methodological innovation, and access to new data and expertise. • Contribute to open and reproducible solutions for data documentation, cataloguing, management, and dissemination, promoting good practice in data curation, metadata, interoperability, transparency, and reproducibility. Design and oversee dashboards, interactive analytical products, and advanced visualizations using appropriate platforms and programming tools. • Develop technical guidelines, methodological protocols, reference materials, and training resources for the application of data science, AI, machine learning, and geospatial approaches to evaluation, supporting their responsible adoption and institutionalization within IEO. • Lead analytical working papers and technical studies supporting IEO evaluations, including methodological design, quantitative and computational analysis, interpretation of findings, preparation of visualizations, and presentation of results and methodological limitations. • Undertake other analytical and methodological assignments as required, exercising independent judgment in defining approaches, resolving complex technical issues, and delivering high-quality outputs within agreed objectives and timelines.