Scientific Programmer (Computer Scientist)

This vacancy is for a Scientific Programmer (Computer Scientist) in the National Telecommunications and Information Administration within the Department of Commerce.

**Qualifications:**
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-3 is equivalent to the GS-11/12 grade levels. To qualify at the ZP-3, 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-09 or ZP-2 (or equivalent band) in the Federal service. Specialized experience is defined as: At least 52 weeks of software development experience to create and improve software solutions AND at least 52 weeks 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). -OR- SUBSTITUTION OF EDUCATION: 3 years of progressively higher-level graduate education leading to a Ph.D. degree or equivalent doctoral degree in computer science or field directly related to the position. -OR- COMBINATION OF EDUCATION AND EXPERIENCE: A combination of education and experience may be used to qualify for this position as long as the computed percentage of the requirements is at least 100%.