Social Data Scientist

**Job Title:** Social Data Scientist **Organisation:** Inflect Consulting **Location:** New Delhi (with travel across India and internationally as required) **Reporting to:** Founder **About Inflect** Inflect is a policy intelligence and systems\-diagnostics firm working at the intersection of public policy, regulatory foresight, and institutional reform. We partner with governments, multilaterals, and private\-sector stakeholders to diagnose systemic delivery failures, map policy architecture, and design implementation\-ready interventions across sectors, including climate resilience, public health, fiscal systems, digital governance, land administration, EV policy, and social protection. Our work is deeply research\-driven, politically informed, and implementation\-focused. We are building a team that combines analytical rigour with strong stakeholder engagement and the ability to translate complex policy insight into actionable partnerships. **Role Overview** The Social Data Scientist will lead Inflect's quantitative research and data analysis function, applying rigorous social science methodology to complex policy challenges. This person will design and execute data\-driven research across domains, including socioeconomic programme evaluation, NLP\-based classification of government schemes, impact analysis of social protection interventions, and geospatial data analysis for policy diagnostics. Beyond their individual research output, this person will serve as a senior analytical voice within the team. Colleagues working on data\-intensive projects will rely on them to validate methodological choices, interpret findings in their policy context, and ensure that Inflect's research output meets high standards of rigour, accuracy, and reproducibility. **Core Mandate** To deliver high\-quality, senior\-level quantitative research and analytical expertise that sits at the centre of Inflect's policy intelligence work, combining deep social science foundations with applied technical capability across statistical modelling, government data systems, and AI\-assisted research workflows, while serving as the most experienced analytical voice in the room on questions of research design, data quality, and evidence interpretation. **Key Responsibilities** **1\. Core Responsibilities** * Lead the design and execution of quantitative research projects across Inflect's priority domains, including impact evaluation, socioeconomic diagnostics, programme monitoring, and policy analytics. * Develop and apply statistical and econometric models for complex social science data, including panel data, time\-series, cross\-sectional, and survey\-weighted datasets drawn from government and administrative sources. * Integrate and analyse large\-scale datasets from sources including the Census, NFHS, PLFS, UDISE, eGazette, parliamentary repositories, and ministry datasets, ensuring data quality, consistency, and interpretability. * Design and implement M\&E frameworks for government schemes and social protection programmes, including social audit methodologies, grant management analytics, and beneficiary tracking systems. * Lead NLP\-based classification and analysis of government schemes, policy documents, and regulatory texts, contributing to Inflect's institutional knowledge infrastructure. * Apply geospatial analysis techniques to policy\-relevant questions across domains, including climate resilience, land administration, infrastructure access, and social equity. * Translate analytical findings into clear, evidence\-based outputs including policy briefs, research reports, dashboards, and decision\-support tools calibrated for government, multilateral, and private\-sector audiences. * Establish and enforce standards for data documentation, reproducibility, and version control across the team's research workflows. **2\. Supporting Responsibilities** * Contribute to the development and maintenance of Inflect's shared data repositories, codebases, and scheme classification frameworks. * Support junior analysts in research design, methodology, and data interpretation, raising the analytical quality of the team's overall output. * Stay current with methodological developments in social data science, applied econometrics, and AI\-assisted policy research, and bring relevant advances into Inflect's practice. **Candidate Profile** **Essential Experience** * 5 or more years of experience in applied quantitative research, social data science, or policy analytics, spanning government\-facing, research institution, or multilateral contexts. * Demonstrated expertise in statistical and econometric methods for social science data, including panel data analysis, impact evaluation frameworks (DiD, IV, RDD, PSM), and survey\-weighted estimation. * Strong programming proficiency in Python and/or R, with hands\-on experience in data cleaning, wrangling, feature engineering, and reproducible research workflows. Familiarity with Stata is an advantage. * Proven experience working with large\-scale Indian government datasets, including an understanding of their structural limitations, sampling design, and methodological implications for analysis. * Experience designing and executing monitoring and evaluation frameworks for social programmes, including familiarity with government scheme architecture and inter\-ministerial data flows. * Familiarity with NLP techniques applied to policy or regulatory text, including classification, summarisation, topic modelling, and entity extraction. * Experience with SQL and database management for multi\-source, large\-volume datasets. **Skills \& Attributes** * Intellectual confidence to serve as a senior analytical reference point, capable of making and defending methodological choices in a team of technically capable peers. * Strong policy instincts, with the ability to move fluidly between data and its real\-world governance implications without losing rigour at either end. * Organised and thorough, with the discipline to manage multiple research workstreams simultaneously without compromising quality or reproducibility. * Clear and precise communicator, able to translate complex quantitative findings for non\-technical policy audiences, including government officials and multilateral partners. **Preferred Background** * Postgraduate qualification in economics, statistics, development studies, applied social data science, or a related field. * Prior experience within or alongside government ministries, state\-level departments, or multilateral organisations in India. * Exposure to geospatial or environmental data in a policy context, including urban planning, climate, agriculture, or land use. * Familiarity with AI\-assisted research workflows, including the use of language models for policy document analysis, scheme classification, or data synthesis. * Experience with capacity building, stakeholder training, or knowledge transfer within government or civil society settings. **What Success Looks Like** * Quantitative research that is methodologically sound, policy\-relevant, and clearly communicated, because this person has led it from research design through to final output. * A shared data and methodology infrastructure that becomes a durable institutional asset, enabling faster and more consistent analysis across the team. * A team that operates with greater analytical confidence because a senior expert is in the room who has seen these datasets, these government systems, and these policy questions from the inside. **Why Join Inflect** * Work at the frontier of policy intelligence where rigorous social science meets real government decision\-making. * Operate in an intellectually rigorous environment that treats quantitative research as a discipline, not a support function. * Engage with complex, consequential policy challenges across India's most important governance domains. * Be part of building a firm that combines analytical depth with institutional trust and a genuine commitment to policy impact. **How to Apply** If you are excited by the prospect of applying your expertise in a research\-intensive, analytically rigorous environment, we would like to hear from you. Please share your CV along with a short note describing your experience with social science data, your approach to policy\-relevant research, and any exposure to AI\-assisted or data\-driven research workflows. You can reach us at team@inflectpolicy.com