Cybercrime Senior Data Scientist

Job summary

About the team

Within the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), the Security Data Science team is part of the Cyber Resilience Centre (CRC), tasked with securing our public facing payment services and protecting one of the largest repositories of personal data in the UK. The Security Data Science team support this mission by building capabilities that typically enable the detection of complex attacks and prevention of security incidents, with some data scientists focussing on the prevention of complex, digitally enable fraud attacks. These capabilities are varied, spanning analytics, automation, infrastructure, insights and understanding of complex data sets for various stakeholders.

About the Role

A Cybercrime Detection Senior Data Scientist role involves leading and shaping a range of projects that combine programming skills with data analytics techniques and close stakeholder engagement. Taking direction and working closely with Cybercrime Detection Analysts, they develop and improve monitoring and investigation capabilities.

Seniors within the Security Data Science team own significant workstreams within cyber security analytics and counter-fraud projects. They are responsible for developing the sophistication and accuracy of our analytics capabilities in tackling a range of security and fraud risks. Day-to-day their skills combine those of researcher, consultant, analyst and programmer – with the ability to develop repeatable procedures in code combined with deep contextual data analysis. They drive the use of complex techniques to model, map and programmatically analyse the behaviour of complex entities such as users, devices, and attackers.

Job description

Responsibilities

• Own relationships with enabling stakeholders within Cyber Resilience Centre (CRC), identifying the right people within the CRC Teams that can enable and support our mission.
• Identification and monitoring of known security risks to DWP systems and data, and work with stakeholders to design the effective responses.
• Proactive use of data science techniques, data sources and technology to discover anomalies, assess capability and analyse security data in new ways.
• Developing strong and effective working relationships with Cybercrime Detection Analysts, Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) engineers and other data analysts to ensure emerging threats identified are fully assessed in terms of their potential impact.
• Modelling, mapping, and programmatically analysing the behaviour of complex entities such as users, devices, and attackers. Extracting, transforming, and mapping high-dimensional variables to construct unique, distinguishing data profiles.
• Where appropriate, guiding the design and implementation of capabilities. Optimising data pipelines and algorithms to efficiently scale across massive datasets without compromising accuracy.
• Where appropriate, leveraging AI capability to assist with heavy lifting in the development of complex risk-based capabilities.
• Lead strands of data science and AI work. This includes identifying the specific business need, data gathering, extracting, cleaning, and integrating large-scale, multi-source datasets; determining the best tools, data and techniques to address the problems; ongoing deliverables and presentations; and influencing the business case for delivery.
• Support the design and implementation of analytics within specific products.
• Disseminate key findings to technical and non-technical audiences in a compelling way that is clearly set within a business context and exploits interactive visualisation techniques.
• Keep abreast of emerging technologies, market and industry trends and encourage adoption and best practise throughout the Data Science, Digital and Analyst community.
• Influence the wider Data Science landscape, defining methods, standards and other best practices. Make connections with peers across Government and industry in order to help make DWP a leader in Data Science.
• Ensure work adheres to key privacy, security and data protection principles, and demonstrates ethical considerations such as preventing unintended biases.
• Design experiments and rigorous validation frameworks to ensure profile uniqueness, model stability, and performance.

Person specification

Key Criteria:

The successful applicant will need to demonstrate:

• Experience of using analytical tools including SIEM tools to develop security responses within large amounts of complex data. (Lead Criteria)
• Experience of using analytics for risk scoring, recommender solutions or other operationalised machine learning applications. (Second Lead Criteria)
• Experience of creating automated reporting solutions or bespoke data visualisations with embedded analytics including UI design best practices.
• Experience in delivering apps, APIs or web sites at scale using technologies such as SQL, NoSQL or Graph databases.
• Working with 'big data' challenges such as high volume, variety or velocity of data, correlation, association and inference
• Understanding of potential attacker behaviour.
• Experience of modelling the complex activity of security-related entities (e.g. users, devices).
• Good understanding of data handling, security and privacy best practices.
• Stakeholder management skills and experience working with suppliers and stakeholders across all grades and working with internal/external stakeholders to deliver results.
• Experience of defining and/or maintaining best practices or reusable capabilities.
• Awareness of the latest technology trends in the cyber and analytics domain and their relative merits.

Essential Security Criteria

Please note that the role that you are applying for requires National Security Vetting (NSV) to the level – Developed Vetting (DV). You can find more information at United Kingdom Security Vetting: Applicant - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk) . If you are successful in your application, you will need to attain DV clearance before you can take up post. This is mandatory and is in addition to completion of Baseline Personnel Security Standard (BPSS).

The purpose of the NSV process is to provide a level of assurance about an individual’s trustworthiness, integrity and reliability, and other factors that increase their vulnerability to corruption or risk of committing a security breach. It involves the investigation of an individual’s background and circumstances to achieve this aim.

For meaningful checks to be carried out, you will need to have lived in the UK for a sufficient period of time to enable appropriate checks to be carried out and produce a result which provides the required level of assurance. Candidates are required to meet the UK residency requirements so that National Security Vetting (NSV) checks can be conducted. For developed vetting, you must have resided continuously in the UK for at least 7 of the last 10 years, 2 of which must have been the immediately preceding years from the point of applying for this job.

The application process will ask for personal details about you, your address history, previous relationships, your parents, your employment history, your financial circumstances, and details of any pending, spent or unspent convictions. This list is not exhaustive. Please view the Vetting explained - GOV.UK (