Science Lead

Back to Careers

Job PostingScience Lead

Sunstone Institute is seeking an experienced science lead who will lead the day-to-day work of the data scientists. You will work closely together with the CTO and the Managing Editor. The place of work is Oslo, Norway.  

What you'll do

• Define and maintain methodological standards across data collection, bias detection, statistical modelling, and claim extraction pipelines
• Review and critique analytical work, ensuring rigour and reproducibility before findings are published or communicated externally
• Guide researchers and data scientists on appropriate methods for each problem, from study design through to interpretation
• Identify methodological risks in ongoing projects and propose mitigations
• Stay current with relevant literature and bring best practices into the team's workflows
• Contribute to how we document and communicate uncertainty in our research outputs
• Collaborate with the data infrastructure team to ensure analytical pipelines are fit for scientific purposes
• Collaborate with the Managing Editor in evaluating and selecting projects

Who we're looking for

• A strong quantitative background, PhD or equivalent experience in a relevant field (statistics, computational social science, epidemiology, political science, ecology, or similar)
• Hands-on: you read, run, and critique analysis written in Python/pandas (Jupyter/Marimo notebooks). This is a working scientific role in a small team, not a pure oversight role; you'll be in the code, not just adjacent to it
• Deep familiarity with the methodological challenges of working with observational, scraped, or otherwise imperfect real-world data
• A track record of reviewing and critiquing analytical work, you've caught real mistakes and helped people do better science
• Experience quantifying and communicating uncertainty, and adjudicating contradictory or low-confidence evidence before it becomes a public-facing claim
• Working knowledge of bias detection in datasets and model outputs
• Comfortable working across domains, collaborating with domain experts rather than being one in every field; our threat areas span environmental, democratic, and health-related systems
• Able to communicate statistical and methodological concepts clearly to non-specialists (journalists, producers, editors)
• Fluent in open-science practice: reproducible, version-controlled analysis and transparent reporting
• Intrigued by contributing to social impact and social innovation through your work

Nice to have

• Experience with data provenance, lineage, and license compliance for reused or scraped third-party data
• Experience with NLP, information extraction, or media-analysis workflows
• Familiarity with structured or semantic representations of research findings: knowledge graphs, RDF, claim-evidence modelling
• Experience working with journalists or communication officers 
• Norwegian language skills (working language is English, but Norwegian is a plus, given our national focus)