Innovation Data Scientist Consultant, Office of Innovation, Stockholm, Sweden, 12 months (Remote working)

Contract

This is a Consultancy contract. More about Consultancy contracts.

UNICEF works in some of the world’s toughest places, to reach the world’s most disadvantaged children. To save their lives. To defend their rights. To help them fulfill their potential.

Across 190 countries and territories, we work for every child, everywhere, every day, to build a better world for everyone.

And we never give up.

For every child… innovate

UNICEF has a 70-year history of innovating for children. We believe that new approaches, partnerships and technologies that support realizing children’s rights are critical to improving their lives.

The Office of Innovation (OoI) works to catalyse UNICEF's and all its partners’ expertise and resources against key children-outcomes bottlenecks, with a view to continuously ideate and scale the most effective solutions with transformational potential at scale to achieve the child-related SDGs. The office is doing this by continuously exploring new ways of accelerating results for children, investing across a range of early stage solutions, and harnessing internal and external expertise towards continuously iterating and finetuning the most promising solutions for children through a systematic portfolio management approach, and leveraging all stakeholders’ innovation energy, knowhow and resources from intergovernmental, multilateral, private sector and non-governmental organizations. This takes place across 160 country offices.

How can you make a difference?

LLM models, services, and infrastructure for various OOI projects/solutions and apply other AI/machine learning techniques as needed to optimize innovation solutions. One of the innovation solutions to be covered is FunDoo. FunDoo is a digital life coach designed to equip young people with 21st century skills, employability skills, and provide access to information on careers, immunization, and climate change, a social innovation and social entrepreneurship programme anchored in human-centered design. It is built on UNICEF’s RapidPro platform and follows the learning by doing principle for content delivery and learning.

OOI seeks a developer for a pilot AI project to enhance its FunDoo platform, focusing on personalized learning and natural language interaction. The project includes creating a recommendation engine based on user demographics, task history, and behavior patterns to tailor content uniquely. Additionally, it involves integrating a large language model (LLM) for dynamic response generation and new content creation, ensuring alignment with FunDoo's tone and existing content. This AI integration aims to improve user engagement in career development, employability skills, and immunization, interfacing with RapidPro for seamless multi-channel communication. The goal is to elevate the learning experience through tailored interactions and enriched content accessibility.

Another project is analyzing UNICEF’s Country Office Annual Reports (COARs). COARs provide a rich data source for country offices’ innovation work that are made publicly available every year. The consultant is expected to run analysis working with large text datasets and retrieve innovation-related sections to draw insights on scaling innovations at the country office levels. Insights are to be summarized and presented in a short report, a blog post, and a webinar. Learnings and any implications for other similar projects or use cases are also to be documented. Over the course of the contract period, other deliverables may be added within the estimated working days/timeline.

To qualify as an advocate for every child you will have…

• An advanced university degree (master’s or higher) in Computer Science, Mathematics or Statistics, Computational linguistics, Engineering, or a related field.
• *A first University Degree in a relevant field combined with 2 additional years of professional experience may be accepted in lieu of an Advanced University Degree.
• 3+ years of professional hands-on experience leveraging large sets of structured and unstructured data to develop data-driven tactical and strategic analytics and insights using ML, NLP, computer vision solutions. Writing production data pipelines and applications is a plus.
• Hands-on experience developing natural language processing (NLP) models.
• Experience with implementing information search and retrieval at scale, using a range of solutions ranging from keyword search to semantic search using embeddings.
• Knowledge of developing or tuning Large Language Models (LLM) and Generative AI (GAI).
• Knowledge of NLP, LLMs (extractive and generative), fine-tuning and LLM model development. Familiar with higher level trends in LLMs and open-source platforms.
• Experience with contributing to Github and open-source initiatives or in research projects.
• Passion for code simplicity and performance.
• Ability to elaborate complex models and ideas to non-technical personnel.
• Ability to make decisions on moderately complex to complex issues regarding technical approach for project components.
• Experience working with the UN system, NGOs, governments in the development/humanitarian context is preferred.
• Experience in working with multiple countries and with multiple stakeholders an asset.
• Strong interpersonal and networking skills. Ability to work collaboratively in a team and in a diverse work environment.
• Fluency in English is required. Knowledge of another official UN language (Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian or Spanish) or a local language is an asset.

For more details, please see attached the ToR. TOR Data scientist.pdf

Travel:

• The consultant is expected to travel to Stockholm, for a stay of 2 nights for 3 times over the duration of the consultancy.

• The consultant is responsible for arranging his/her own travel, including visa and travel insurance.

  Payment details and further considerations

• Payment of professional fees will be based on the submission of agreed deliverables. UNICEF reserves the right to withhold payment in case the deliverables submitted are not up to the required standard or in case of delays in submitting the deliverables on the part of the consultant.

How to apply:

• Interested applicants are required to submit a technical proposal shorter than 3 pages.
• Interested applicants are required to submit a financial proposal with all-inclusive fee. Please see the financial proposal template.  Consultancy Financial Offer template.docx
• Financial proposal must include travel costs (economy class) and daily subsistence allowance, if travel is required as per TOR and any other estimated costs: visa,
• travel/health insurance.
• Applications without a financial proposal will not be considered.

UNICEF is committed to diversity and inclusion within its workforce, and encourages all candidates, irrespective of gender, nationality, religious and ethnic backgrounds, including persons living with disabilities, to apply to become a part of the organization. UNICEF has a zero-tolerance policy on conduct that is incompatible with the aims and objectives of the United Nations and UNICEF, including sexual exploitation and abuse, sexual harassment, abuse of authority and discrimination. UNICEF also adheres to strict child safeguarding principles. All selected candidates will, therefore, undergo rigorous reference and background checks, and will be expected to adhere to these standards and principles.

For every Child, you demonstrate…

UNICEF's values of Care, Respect, Integrity, Trust, Accountability, and Sustainability (CRITAS).

To view our competency framework, please visit here.

UNICEF is here to serve the world’s most disadvantaged children and our global workforce must reflect the diversity of those children. The UNICEF family is committed to include everyone, irrespective of their race/ethnicity, age, disability, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, nationality, socio-economic background, or any other personal characteristic.

UNICEF offers reasonable accommodation for consultants/individual contractors with disabilities. This may include, for example, accessible software, travel assistance for missions or personal attendants. We encourage you to disclose your disability during your application in case you need reasonable accommodation during the selection process and afterwards in your assignment.

UNICEF has a zero-tolerance policy on conduct that is incompatible with the aims and objectives of the United Nations and UNICEF, including sexual exploitation and abuse, sexual harassment, abuse of authority and discrimination. UNICEF also adheres to strict child safeguarding principles. All selected candidates will be expected to adhere to these standards and principles and will therefore undergo rigorous reference and background checks. Background checks will include the verification of academic credential(s) and employment history. Selected candidates may be required to provide additional information to conduct a background check.

Remarks:

Only shortlisted candidates will be contacted and advance to the next stage of the selection process.

Individuals engaged under a consultancy or individual contract will not be considered “staff members” under the Staff Regulations and Rules of the United Nations and UNICEF’s policies and procedures and will not be entitled to benefits provided therein (such as leave entitlements and medical insurance coverage). Their conditions of service will be governed by their contract and the General Conditions of Contracts for the Services of Consultants and Individual Contractors. Consultants and individual contractors are responsible for determining their tax liabilities and for the payment of any taxes and/or duties, in accordance with local or other applicable laws.

The selected candidate is solely responsible to ensure that the visa (applicable) and health insurance required to perform the duties of the contract are valid for the entire period of the contract. Selected candidates are subject to confirmation of fully vaccinated status against SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) with a World Health Organization (WHO)-endorsed vaccine, which must be met prior to taking up the assignment. It does not apply to consultants who will work remotely and are not expected to work on or visit UNICEF premises, programme delivery locations or directly interact with communities UNICEF works with, nor to travel to perform functions for UNICEF for the duration of their consultancy contracts.

Should you have any questions, please contact: swe-ooi-recruitments@unicef.org