The highlights

• Excellent career opportunity to apply your skills and make a difference
• Generous conditions of employment including 12% superannuation
• A new opportunity in 2023 with a progressive and innovative social enterprise!

Use your Data Science skills to help create far-reaching social change

The Innovation Lab is where new ideas are seeded and data projects are developed. If you’re looking for a role where you will be wrangling data and leading AI and data projects that will make a difference in the community you live in. We have the job for you!

This position offers a rare opportunity to extend your career in a dynamic and successful social enterprise. You can help us maintain our software’s position at the top of its class in Australia and New Zealand. You can have it all! Stimulating work, great conditions and a positive impact through your work.

About us

Innovation Lab, Our parent enterprise Our Community’s founding aim in 2000 was to build stronger communities through stronger community organisations. Since 2009, SmartyGrants has helped keep the money moving, with billions of dollars now moving into the not-for-profit sector more efficiently.

Over the past five years Our Community has built up our data capability and supported not-for-profit organisations and grantmakers to do the same. Our clients and partners are becoming more data-savvy and there is greater demand for data-driven products and services.

Now there’s a new currency powering social reform. Data is reshaping our world. New tools allow us to collect, distil, understand, and act on data like never before, hastening the pace of change. We want to make sure the social sector can grasp the possibilities presented by these new tools.

Our Community, the company behind SmartyGrants and the Innovation Lab, provides advice, connections, training and easy-to-use tech tools for people and organisations working to build stronger communities. Our vision centres on social inclusion and social equity. Our dream is that every Australian should be able to go out their front door and stroll or wheel to a community group that suits their interests, passions and needs – or log on and do the same.

What we need you to do

We’re looking for a Senior Data Scientist to join our established Innovation lab Team. You’ll be integral to the team, leading data science projects and managing internal and external stakeholders while continuing to have a hands-on approach to work using the tools of the trade.

We are looking for a strategic mind that will help us deliver an exciting data science agenda in the upcoming years. You will focus on the delivery of customer outcomes, AI services and advancing our product offerings. You will participate in our data governance forums, ensuring our ethics are upheld and treating our data, and data belonging to our stakeholders, with utmost respect.

You will have

• 3+ years’ experience in a data science environment, with some exposure in leading a team of professionals.
• Proven planning and organisational and time management skills with the ability to prioritise tasks to meet deadlines.
• Promote a highly collaborative working environment within and across the team
• Experience or interest in learning data engineering, in the contest of model deployment, API integrations to software, AWS pipelines and others.

You’re inquisitive with a keen interest in discovering new approaches as well as delivering tried and tested methodologies.

If you like to stick closely to job descriptions or have a ‘not my job’ mentality, this is probably not the role for you. If you’re excited by challenges, willing to give most things a go and know how to fill any knowledge gaps when the need arises, then this job will be a good fit.

The impact you will have

This is your opportunity to be part of a game-changing agenda. We are impatient for progressive social change, and we aren’t prepared to wait for others to create it. We want to be right at the centre of it. This role offers a unique opportunity to help shape the future of your community.

You’ll get the opportunity to work in an ethical company with all the excitement and agility of a start-up without the headaches. We’re built on solid foundations, we’re sustainable and successful – but we’ve only just begun. We’re not interested in just keeping things ticking along. We’re builders and we’re on a mission.

Other relevant information

To create a better work-life balance, the Our Community team works a 4-day week (pay for 5 days). We deliver 100% of the work in 80% of the time for 100% of the pay. We have high productivity, reduced stress levels, improved mental health and great team cohesion.

Our office is located on Wurundjeri Country at 552 Victoria St, North Melbourne. Our team work a blended model of onsite and remote work (generally 2 day per week in the office).

We recognise the importance of balance and flexibility and understand that a one-size-fits-all approach does not work for most. We’d be delighted to welcome applicants from a variety of situations, including parents returning to the workforce.

The successful candidate

• Must be an Australian Citizen, Permanent Resident or hold a valid work permit or visa.
• Will be required to undertake a Police Check.
• Will be subject to a probationary period of three (3) months.

A position description is attached.