Data Analyst - Economics 12 months FTC

The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) is a world leader in global business intelligence. We help businesses, the financial sector and governments to understand how the world is changing and how that creates opportunities to be seized and risks to be managed.

As part of a major digital transformation, the EIU is transitioning from a legacy Excel-based forecast and data system to a scalable, cloud-based architecture using AWS. This transformation is aimed at enabling more rapid product innovation and expanding capabilities in new data streams.

We are seeking a Data Analyst to join our Quantitative Economics team on a contract basis. This international team of data analysts and econometricians plays a central role in this transformation, managing the EIU’s key economic data products and maintaining the statistical and econometric models that drive our forecasts and analyses.

How will you contribute?

You will play a key role in migrating EIU's country and industry forecast models and data pipelines from legacy MS Excel-based systems to a modern Python and AWS-based infrastructure 

Your responsibilities will include:

• System Understanding: Audit and develop a good knowledge of the existing Excel-based systems to extract/ingest raw data, apply transformations, and model macroeconomic and industry variables.
• Data Pipeline Migration: Support the migration of data pipelines (inclusive of data ingestion and data transformations) from Excel to AWS, ensuring efficiency and highest quality
• Model Migration: Assist in transitioning existing economic models from Excel/Eviews to Python/R

You will be expected to:

• Apply your knowledge of macroeconomics and data analysis to assess, audit and recommend changes during the migration, ensuring that deviations from the old system align with new requirements
• Document idiosyncratic features of country models/transformations for better transparency and future auditing
• Data Validation: Perform designated validation checks on migrated data and forecasts to ensure accuracy and consistency
• Cross-functional Collaboration: Liaise with internal engineering and technology teams to troubleshoot issues and ensure smooth integration of new systems.

The ideal skills for this role are:

• • An advanced degree in economics, applied econometrics, applied economics, business economics, business administration or a related quantitative field
  • 1-2 years of experience in areas of applied economic research, macroeconomics, econometrictics , statistical analysis or data science.
  • Good understanding of macroeconomic time series data, common transformations and features of such data eg: trends, seasonality, stationarity etc.
  • Advanced Excel skills – experience with formula auditing, manipulating and cleaning large data sets in excel, knowledge of advanced functions like VLookup/HLookup, Match, Offset, Index, Indirect, Nested If-Then-Else and similar
  • Good understanding of G Suite apps, especially Google Sheets for data management and collaboration.
  • Proficiency in Python for scripting and data wrangling, transformations, cleaning and basic visualisation tasks 
  • Good knowledge of SQL to query databases

  Good to have:

  • Experience working with software development teams or practices, including familiarity in agile methodologies, shared codebases, and collaborative workflows.
  • Familiarity in using Python libraries like Pandas, NumPy, and Matplotlib.
  • Experience with AWS services, including S3 and Athena
  • Understanding of Command Line Interface (CLI) for managing cloud or local environments