What we are looking for:
We're looking for an experienced Data Scientist to help shape the future of humanitarian action through CLEAR (Crisis Learning, Early Warning and Anticipatory Action) - NRC's open infrastructure designed to transform fragmented crisis data into timely, actionable intelligence.
CLEAR brings together diverse data sources - including earth observation, conflict data, field reports, and market intelligence - into a shared, open, and federated platform that enables humanitarian teams to anticipate crises and act before they escalate. By closing the gap between insight and action, CLEAR empowers faster, smarter, and more effective humanitarian responses.
As the Data Scientist, you will play a pivotal role in designing and deploying cutting-edge machine learning and deep learning solutions that support early warning systems and humanitarian decision-making. You will develop predictive models capable of identifying emerging crisis patterns, forecasting humanitarian needs, and transforming complex, multimodal datasets into practical insights for field operations.
This is a highly technical, hands-on role suited to someone who enjoys building, training, and fine-tuning AI models from the ground up. You are comfortable working in data-scarce, rapidly evolving environments, proactively sourcing and preparing data, and solving complex challenges where real-world impact matters.
Working closely with the AI Lead, software developers, and data engineers, you will contribute across the full machine learning lifecycle - from model development and optimisation to performance monitoring and deployment. You will also help shape the technical environment in which models are trained and refined, ensuring AI solutions are scalable, robust, and aligned with the operational realities of humanitarian response.
What you will do:
Here are some of your specific responsibilities
- Support the design and implementation of CLEAR’s data architecture.
- Partner with developers and data engineers to design and stand up the environment needed to train and fine-tune models (including data ingestion pipelines, compute and GPU resources, experiment tracking and MLOps tooling) actively shaping that environment rather than waiting for it to be provided.
- Develop machine learning and deep learning models that integrate multiple data streams to detect early indicators of humanitarian crises, combining earth observation and satellite imagery, conflict event data, climate monitoring, economic indicators, and population movement patterns into unified risk assessment frameworks.
- Build computer-vision and remote-sensing models on satellite and aerial imagery (for example flood-extent mapping, building and settlement detection, displacement-site monitoring, infrastructure damage assessment and land-cover change detection) and fuse these earth observation outputs with non-imagery signals.
- Contribute to building automated alert systems that identify emerging crises, calibrating prediction algorithms for different crisis types.
- Create ensemble modelling approaches that combine traditional statistical methods with advanced AI techniques.
- Fine-tune and adapt foundation models and large language models to humanitarian use cases such as document triage, multilingual report analysis and situation summarisation.
- Explore venues for adapting models to evolving crisis conditions through reinforcement learning systems.
- Implement impact-based forecasting systems that translate meteorological, conflict, and economic predictions into specific humanitarian consequences such as displacement volumes, food insecurity levels, and infrastructure damage estimates.
- Build decision trees and recommendation engines that guide field staff through systematic needs assessment processes informed by predictive analytics and historical response data.
- Create automated reporting systems and interactive dashboards that enable field teams and leadership to access real-time data for rapid response activities.
- Any other tasks assigned by the CLEAR Technical Lead and AI Lead related to CLEAR data.
Please download the detailed job description to learn more about this position.
What you will bring:
- Advanced degree in Data Science, Statistics, Computer Science, Physics, Engineering, Economics or a related quantitative field, with a minimum of 5 years of professional experience in applied data science.
- Demonstrated experience designing, training and fine-tuning deep learning models (e.g. CNNs, recurrent/sequence models and transformers), including how to structure training runs, manage compute, and diagnose and improve model performance.
- Advanced proficiency in Python for statistical analysis, machine learning and data manipulation, with experience in key libraries including pandas, NumPy, scikit-learn, TensorFlow, PyTorch and Keras.
- Strong SQL skills for database management and complex query optimization.
- Hands-on experience implementing supervised and unsupervised learning algorithms including regression models, classification techniques, clustering methods, and time series analysis.
- A proven track record of proactively sourcing and engineering data (finding, negotiating access to, cleaning and, where necessary, generating data).
- Experience designing and implementing ETL pipelines for processing datasets from multiple sources, with skills in data cleaning, transformation and quality assurance at scale.
- Ability to create automated reporting systems and dashboards using tools like Tableau, Power BI or similar platforms.
- Experience working with large, messy, real-world datasets.
- Understanding of model deployment and MLOps practices, and comfort working with engineers to provision the infrastructure models need.
- Fundamental skills with version control software and collaborative development.
- Fluency in written and spoken English. Other languages are an asset.
- Practical experience working in low-data or data-scarce settings, including transfer learning, few-shot learning, data augmentation and synthetic data generation to overcome limited training data.
- Experience implementing and fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for applied tasks.
- Experience with natural language processing techniques for analyzing reports, social media or news data relevant to crisis monitoring.
- Experience using GenAI for automated analysis of large volumes of documents — extracting key themes, sentiment analysis and identifying emerging trends across multiple contexts and languages.
- Understanding of ensemble methods and explainable AI techniques for transparent decision-making.
- Experience working with earth observation and satellite imagery; optical (e.g. Sentinel-2, Landsat) and radar / SAR (e.g. Sentinel-1), alongside commercial high-resolution sources, and with geospatial tooling such as Google Earth Engine, rasterio / GDAL, xarray and geopandas.
- Applying computer vision and deep learning to imagery (semantic segmentation, object detection, change detection) for humanitarian tasks such as flood-extent mapping, damage assessment, settlement and displacement-site detection, infrastructure monitoring and population estimation (a strong asset).
- Experience with multimodal data fusion.
What we offer:
- Duty station: Remote (Germany, France, UK or Belgium)
- Contract: Fixed term (2 years)
- Travel: Up to 10%
- Salary/benefits: Grade 9 on NRC’s Resident salary scale, with accompanying terms and conditions.
- NRC is an equal opportunities employer. We are committed to diversity without distinction to age, gender, religion, ethnicity, nationality, and physical ability.
- We think outside the box, encourage ideas, and give responsibility to all employees at all levels. You will have many opportunities to be heard and take the initiative.
Find out more about the benefits of working for NRC
Important information about the application process
- For Internal candidates: To apply as an internal candidate, log in with your official email or click on Opportunity Market Place.
- When creating your profile, include your full name as given on your passport. Complete all the system-required fields for experience, employment history and education.
- Submit your application and CV in English, taking care to attach your latest CV.
- Applications that do not meet the minimum standards in terms of experience or qualifications will generally not be considered. Unsolicited applications not related to this specific job advertisement will not be considered.
- We receive many applications for each vacant position and so only shortlisted candidates will be contacted.
If you have any questions about this role, please email ho.recruitment@nrc.no with the job title as the subject line.
Why NRC?
The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) is an independent humanitarian organisation helping people forced to flee. Our 15,000 staff work in crises across 40 countries, providing life-saving and long-term assistance to millions of people every year.
Watch this short video to see NRC in action.
We are looking for people who are passionate about helping refugees and people forced to flee. Are you one of those people? If you are, NRC offers you the opportunity to:
- do demanding and professional work, often in challenging contexts.
- join a work culture that empowers every employee to share ideas and take responsibility.
- be part of a welcoming and supportive community committed to human dignity.
Organization context
The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) is a global humanitarian organisation helping people forced to flee.
Join us in assisting millions of people in areas where others cannot, tackling some of the world's most dangerous and difficult crises. Bring your skills and dedication to an organisation recognised for providing high quality aid and for defending the rights of refugees and internally displaced people.
At NRC, we give responsibility to employees at all levels and foster professional growth and innovative teams. You can expect a supportive culture and an open dialogue with management. We are committed to diversity, equity and inclusion.
Together, we save lives and rebuild futures.
Safeguarding is central to NRC’s work. We expect all employees to:
• treat everyone with respect and dignity
• contribute to building a safe environment for all
• never engage in any form of exploitation, harassment and specifically sexual exploitation, abuse and sexual harassment (SEAH)
• always report. NRC has a zero-tolerance approach to inaction against exploitation, abuse and SEAH
