Computer Scientist

About this role

Qualification requirements in the vacancy announcements are based on the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Qualification Standards Handbook, which contains federal qualification standards. This handbook is available on the Office of Personnel Management's website located at: https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/classification-qualifications/general-schedule-qualification-standards/#url=Occupational-Series Applicants must possess one year of specialized experience equivalent in difficulty and responsibility to the next lower grade level in the Federal Service.

Specialized experience is experience that has equipped the applicant with the particular competencies/knowledge, skills and abilities to successfully perform the duties of the position. This experience need not have been in the federal government. Experience refers to paid and unpaid experience, including volunteer work done through National Service programs (e.g., Peace Corps, AmeriCorps) and other organizations e.g., professional; philanthropic, religious; spiritual; community, student, social).

Volunteer work helps build critical competencies; knowledge, and skills and can provide valuable training and experience that translates directly to paid employment. You will receive credit for all qualifying experience, including volunteer experience. This position is being filled under the Department of Commerce Alternative Personnel System (CAPS). Under CAPS, positions are classified by career path and pay band. The ZP-4 is equivalent to the GS-13/14 grade levels.

To qualify at the ZP-4, applicants must meet A and B below: A. BASIC REQUIREMENT: A bachelor's degree in computer science or bachelor's degree with 30 semester hours in a combination of mathematics, statistics, and computer science. At least 15 of the 30 semester hours must have included any combination of statistics and mathematics that included differential and integral calculus. All academic and course work must be from accredited or pre-accredited institutions.

AND B. SPECIALIZED EXPERIENCE: You must possess one full year (52 weeks) of specialized experience equivalent to the GS-12 or ZP-3 in the Federal service. Specialized experience is defined as: 1. Software development experience to create and improve software solutions; 2. Creating scientific software programs (for example, metrics, data intensive workloads, algorithms, modeling, data mining, forecasting, optimization, simulations, statistical analysis, numerical analysis, numerical methods, machine learning (ML), artificial Intelligence (AI), signal processing, image/audio/video processing) AND 3.