Job Description
Senior Principal Data Scientist Speridian Technologies is recruiting for a
Senior Principal Data Scientist for our State of California Client, the Department of Healthcare Services, Behavioral Health. This person will be part of a long-term, fully budgeted, state-of-the-art, extremely vast technology modernization project working with a variety of cross-functional teams and stakeholders.
This is a remote role, however, there will be meetings in the Sacramento area several times a year. Candidates are expected to work business hours, Monday-Friday Pacific Time Zone. Join DHCS’s Behavioral Health Transformation: Where Purpose Meets Innovation Location: Remote
Department: Department of Healthcare Services (DHCS)
Commitment: Full-Time Consultant (W2 employee of Speridian or 1099/IC for Speridian)
CA DHCS: Our Core Values (Achieve Together, Be Curious, Elevate Yourself, and Deliver Value)- We achieve together by championing a team-oriented workplace built on mutual respect, collaboration, and open communication.
- We encourage individuals and teams to constantly be curious and seek a deeper understanding and fresh ideas that drive innovation and meaningful change.
- We provide a supportive workplace where you can elevate yourself and achieve personal growth through continuous learning, focused effort, and perseverance.
- We deliver value as part of every action we take to serve California’s citizens.
We’re honest about the challenges—state government is bureaucratic, and we can't match most tech salaries.
But here’s what we can offer:
Purpose that matters
Teammates who care deeply
Work-life balance and remote work
We're not just changing systems—we're changing how government works
Why DHCS? We work
within government,
for government, to deliver outcomes that matter to the citizens of California – but we don’t work
like government. We are value-driven, agile in practice and philosophy, constantly innovating and improving our processes and tech stack, and committed to self-governing teams within a matrixed leadership structure.
We are passionate about solution delivery as a principle, entailing greater transparency and accountability for what is being delivered, decreasing risks faster, delivering organizational value sooner, and maximizing the flexibility and responsiveness of digital solutions to our customers' evolving business needs.
We serve the California Department of Health Care Services, which provides equitable access to quality health care for a third of Californians, leading to a healthy California for all. Right now, we are focused on transforming the delivery of behavioral health care delivery in California, including reducing suicide, drug overdoses, and the types of mental health and addiction crises that result in people living in tents on the streets where we live, too. We take this work very seriously, and we take team camaraderie and enjoying working with each other very seriously. We’re looking for innovators who are passionate about purposeful work and excited by the opportunity to drive lasting change through innovative solutions.
Job Description We are seeking a Senior Principal Data Scientist to lead both the strategic direction and hands-on execution of our data science work. This individual will shape how our organization delivers modern data science, from model development and evaluation to tooling and workflow optimization.
You will be the key resource for evaluating and advancing our use of data science models, algorithms, and libraries, ensuring we use best-in-class approaches and have the platform capabilities needed to succeed. You will work closely with both our internal and state employee data science teams, driving knowledge sharing and building alignment.
This is a hands-on role—expect to write code, build models, and deploy solutions, while also shaping standards and mentoring others.
Job Expectations - Trusted Advisor on Data Science:
- Serve as the primary resource for the VP of Engineering/Data and the team on modern data science methods, including best practices in modeling, algorithm selection, use of statistical and machine learning libraries, and effective workflows.
- Collaborative Integrator:
- Partner with the current state employee data science branch—help them understand new approaches, share knowledge, bridge process and skills gaps, and drive cross-team alignment. Evaluate and recommend ways to close any identified gaps in skills, process, or tooling.
- Data Science Platform Advocate:
- Be the lead voice for what is needed from our data platform to enable world-class data science—prioritize requirements for analytics tooling, libraries, compute environments, data access patterns, and experimentation. Assess and advise on whether our current tools and environments are sufficient, and work with the data platform team to fill knowledge or capability gaps from a data scientist’s perspective.
- Technical Leadership in Data Science:
- Set and champion standards, best practices, and guidelines for modeling, code quality, reproducibility, and documentation—ensuring all data science work aligns with modernization and business needs.
- Hands-On Expertise:
- Write code, build predictive models, run experiments, and deploy data science solutions. Mentor by doing, not just advising.
- Quality & Results Ownership:
- Ensure rigorous data quality and model evaluation standards across teams. Continuously raise the bar for accuracy, reliability, and reproducibility in all data science work.
- Strategic Doer:
- Anticipate future ML/AI needs. Drive innovation while remaining hands-on and delivery-focused.
Key Responsibilities: - Advise leadership and teams on data science models, libraries, algorithms, and evaluation techniques.
- Lead technical decisions on which tools, libraries, and environments best support data science work.
- Evaluate and articulate requirements for the data platform, ensuring it meets the needs of modern data science and ML/AI workloads.
- Integrate and mentor state employee data science teams, identifying and addressing skills or process gaps.
- Set standards and best practices for modeling, code, reproducibility, and documentation.
- Deliver high-quality, reliable, and reproducible data science solutions.
- Stay current with advances in machine learning, predictive modeling, and related technologies.
- Be a champion for hands-on delivery and strategic innovation.
Minimum Qualifications: - Deep hands-on experience building and deploying data science models and ML solutions.
- Mastery of key statistical, machine learning, and AI libraries (e.g., scikit-learn, TensorFlow, PyTorch, XGBoost).
- Proven track record evaluating and optimizing data science tooling and environments.
- Experience mentoring and integrating data science teams.
- Strong programming skills (Python, R, or similar).
- Experience defining standards and best practices in data science teams
Speridian is an EEO employer
Job Tags
Full time, Remote work, Monday to Friday,