N.A. Data Scientist

Job information:

Division / Unit: National Associations / N.A. Strategic Development
Contract type: Permanent
Start date: 08.01.2024 or as soon as possible
Location: Nyon

Main goal:

The National Associations' Strategic Development unit exists to help national associations achieve their potential. Our mission is to generate and gather knowledge, to establish services for national associations, and to bring people together. Insights is a key domain of our UEFA Grow programme. We work with and for national associations to grow football. To help us deliver on this mission, we are looking for a N.A. Data Scientist to join our team.

The NA Data Scientist will be responsible for collecting, processing and analysing large sets of structured and unstructured data from UEFA's 55 member associations, their markets and football in general. The NA Data Scientist will work towards centralising all national association data and knowledge.

The position entails working with data from various sources such as surveys, reports, databases and cloud computing platforms, and using it for statistical modelling with R or Python to provide actionable insights for the strategic development of UEFA member associations. The NA Data Scientist will primarily serve the NA Strategic Development unit, and will liaise regularly with the UEFA Data Management team to ensure that practices are aligned. The role will also collaborate with a broad range of stakeholders, including other UEFA units inside and outside the National Associations division, UEFA member associations and external agencies.

Key responsibilities:

- Performing cleaning, preparation, analysis and reporting/visualisation processes and curating meaningful insights
- Structuring, consolidating and harmonising data across various tools and sources to bring data from several fields in UEFA's 55 member associations into UEFA's data warehouse (Snowflake)
- Complying with the Data Management team's procedures on internal business data governance
- Automating data inputs and reporting outputs, and developing predictive models where feasible and appropriate
- Helping to map out the national associations' data landscape, prioritising strategic questions and identifying and collecting the required data sources
- Identifying missing data and using open data (e.g. global and national data sets) to enrich our data offer
- Implementing data collection and sharing initiatives, in collaboration with various internal and external stakeholders
- Developing tools to showcase national associations' data and monitor key performance indicators of relevant strategic development initiatives (e.g. UEFA programmes such as Grow and HatTrick);
- Assisting the unit with other tasks and project/event support as required

Profile:

Experience required:
- At least two years of experience in a similar role
- Experience working with global institutions (e.g. Eurostat, UN, WHO, OECD) and with their data sets would be an asset
- Previous work experience in or an understanding of the sports governance landscape, including UEFA's member associations, would be an asset

Education:
- Masters in computer science, data science, economics, mathematics, statistics or a similar field
- Certificates relating to data analytics/science would be a plus

Languages:
- English / Proficient

Additional requirements:
- MS Office / Proficient
- Strong background in data mining, data science, statistical analysis or machine learning
- Experience in building compelling data-based tools that enable top management to make well-informed strategic decisions
- Experience with Tableau and/or Dataiku would be a plus
- Advanced skills with high-level programming languages, such as R or Python
- Ability to integrate APIs, scrape data from the web and wrangle structured and unstructured data sets
- Proven ability to design, implement and validate modelling techniques e.g. parametric methods, Bayesian non-parametric methods, hierarchical Bayesian models, discrete choice models and machine learning
- Experience with process-flow technology, e.g. Knime, Alteryx, Dataiku, would be an asset
- Understanding of Streamlit web app functionality would be an asset
- Ability to read and write SQL would be an asset
- Knowledge of cloud-based technologies, e.g. AWS and Snowflake, would be an asset
- Experience with AI tools
- Data enthusiast who loves to work with data
- Able to provide senior management with a solid foundation on which to build recommendations on the strategic development of national associations
- Approachable, personable and willing to work in a collaborative manner
- Willing to travel occasionally