Python Research Software Consultant (Competitive Pay, Short-Term, Remote), Texas Southern University
Company:
Location: Remote
Published: 1970-01-01
Houston, TX, USA
OVERVIEW
I seek a highly qualified Python research software consultant to assist in refactoring, organizing, and documenting two related social science research codebases for publication-grade reproducibility and open-source public release. This is a short-term, remote consulting opportunity with competitive compensation.
PROJECTS
This work comprises two related components:
PNAS Research Article Codebase
Prepare for publication the Python hierarchical Bayesian modeling (HBM) codebase underlying a manuscript soon to be submitted to PNAS on global scientific production. This codebase requires refactoring, reorganization, and documentation to meet publication-grade standards of clarity, structure, and computational reproducibility.
Advanced Data Analytics Platform Codebase
Prepare for public release version 2.0 of an advanced data analytics platform built with Python, SQLAlchemy, and PostgreSQL as an open-source demonstration platform for research on the contemporary history of quantum information science (QIS).
This role focuses on research software engineering, code organization, documentation, and reproducibility rather than on statistical model development.
RESPONSIBILITIES
Improve the clarity, structure, reproducibility, and maintainability of both codebases.
Develop clear documentation, including README files, docstrings, in-code comments, and usage examples.
Ensure reliable, reproducible execution from raw data to final analytical outputs.
SCOPE
The two codebases together include approximately 20 Jupyter notebooks, some as long as 3,000 lines. The consultant will focus on the highest-priority components necessary to produce a clean, reproducible, publication-ready codebase rather than refactoring every notebook in full.
QUALIFICATIONS
Ph.D., advanced graduate student, or experienced research software engineer in computer science, software engineering, data science, or a related field.
Strong expertise in Python.
Experience refactoring, organizing, and documenting research codebases.
Experience preparing computational research code for peer-reviewed publication and computational reproducibility, especially code supporting a major article submission in computational social science or related fields, preferred.
Experience with hierarchical Bayesian modeling preferred.
Experience preparing codebases for open-source public release preferred.
Experience with reproducible research practices, including environment management, workflows, and version control, preferred.
Experience with SQLAlchemy preferred.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Compensation: Competitive hourly compensation of $80–$150, with total compensation in the range of $7,000–$10,000, depending on qualifications, experience, and scope of work.
Duration: Flexible, with total hours depending on consultant availability, qualifications, and final scope. All work must be completed by June 30, 2026.
Location: Remote.
HOW TO APPLY
Please send a brief statement of interest outlining your background and relevant experience, together with your CV and links to any code samples or repositories, to:
Professor Roger Hart, Department of History & Geography, Texas Southern University
Roger.Hart@TSU.edu
http://rhart.org/
Software Engineer (Python/Data), Nava PBC
Company:
Location: Remote
Published: 1970-01-01
Remote, United States
About Nava
Nava is a consultancy and public benefit corporation working to make government services simple and effective. Since 2015, federal, state, and local agencies have trusted Nava to help solve highly scrutinized technology modernization challenges.
As a client services company, we guide agencies constrained by legacy systems to a future with sharp user experiences built on secure, reliable, fault-tolerant cloud infrastructure. We bill for our time, offering our expertise and problem-solving approach to help our government partners enhance their digital products and services. People are at the heart of our work, from members of the public who rely on benefit programs to government agency staff. Through human-centered design and modern engineering best practices, we help our government partners understand user needs and deliver on their missions more effectively. This focus gives everyone at Nava the opportunity to do work that is meaningful, impactful, and deeply connected to public good.
Position summary
In this role, you’ll partner with government stakeholders and Nava’s engineering, design, and product teams to modernize data architectures and pipelines for critical public programs. You’ll design and implement scalable data models and databases, improve pipeline performance and security, and build systems that support the storage, processing, and analysis of large-scale data. You will support the data needs of multiple teams, systems, and products in addition to creating and optimizing our government partners' data architecture.
What you'll do
Work with cross-functional project teams to gather business requirements and translate to detailed technical specifications
Work with Government partners to assist and develop data engineering applications and pipelines that will enable data services and processing capabilities, such as advanced analytics, AI/ML, and experimentation
Design, develop, test, automate, and deploy data engineering solutions in a cloud platforms, such as AWS
Participate in software design and code reviews
Develop automated testing, monitoring and alerting, and CI/CD for production systems
Required skills
Minimum of 8 years of experience with professional software engineering practices using such tools and methodologies as Agile Software Development, Test Driven Development, CI/CD, and Source Code Management
Experience with building ETL pipelines to ingest, process, and store data
Prior experience with Python programming for both data processing and server-side use cases
Experience with data cleaning, modeling, schema design while protecting sensitive data
Proficient with building data integrations using both API and file-based protocols
Proficient with relational databases and advanced SQL queries, particularly with Postgresql
Experience with using data observability tools to maintain data infrastructure and data quality
Proficient in refining high-level goals into high-impact, low-effort tasks and milestones based on human-centered design practices to prioritize options for stakeholders
Desired skills
Experience using data observability tools to maintain data infrastructure and data quality
Experience with AWS services like ECS, S3, CloudWatch, and Glue
Infrastructure as code experience tools like Terraform
Legacy modernization, especially with mainframes
Comfortable troubleshooting complex data and systems interaction problems
Please note: the level of the role will be determined by Nava leadership based on experience and skillset.
Compensation
$120,600 - $135,900 USD