Protect our Land, Ascend with Us!

Ascension is seeking an experienced Risk Subject Matter Expert (SME) to provide specialized expertise in risk analysis, safety risk assessment, and risk-based decision frameworks supporting the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA). This role serves as a principal technical authority responsible for evaluating, refining, validating, and implementing risk methodologies that support PHMSA’s hazardous materials safety oversight mission.

The ideal candidate is a seasoned risk professional with deep experience applying quantitative and qualitative risk analysis methods within complex safety, transportation, industrial, regulatory, or mission-critical environments. The successful candidate will bring expertise in developing risk models, evaluating risk factors and weighting methodologies, conducting consequence modeling, validating analytical approaches, and translating complex analytical findings into actionable recommendations for senior government stakeholders.

This position is critical to helping PHMSA advance toward a more proactive, data-driven safety oversight environment by strengthening capabilities such as the Office of Hazardous Materials Safety (OHMS) Daily Risk Ranking (DRR), Probability Risk Model (PRM), and associated risk-based inspection and prioritization approaches. PHMSA’s requirement focuses on moving these capabilities from development toward validated, operational, sustainable, and measurable capabilities supporting oversight, inspection targeting, enforcement support, and resource allocation.

Summary of the Contractor Role

The Risk SME will serve as the senior technical expert responsible for guiding PHMSA’s risk assessment, risk methodology development, and risk model implementation activities.

The contractor will support PHMSA by:

• Evaluating existing risk methodologies and identifying opportunities for improvement.
• Refining risk factors, weighting approaches, and scoring methodologies.
• Supporting the development and validation of risk models used for regulatory oversight.
• Applying quantitative and qualitative analysis techniques to assess safety risks.
• Conducting root-cause analysis and consequence modeling.
• Supporting risk prioritization approaches for regulated entities and activities.
• Validating risk rankings using enterprise data, partner agency information, and open-source data.
• Translating analytical results into operational tools, processes, procedures, and decision-support products.

The role requires an individual who can independently analyze complex technical challenges, work with multidisciplinary teams, and communicate highly technical risk concepts to both technical personnel and executive decision-makers.

The Risk SME will directly support PHMSA efforts to review and enhance the Daily Risk Ranking (DRR) methodology, including revised risk factors and weights, advanced modeling and analysis, enhanced risk methodologies, and investigator risk assessment approaches.

Expected Day-to-Day Activities

The Risk SME will:

• Lead quantitative and qualitative risk assessments supporting PHMSA safety programs.
• Evaluate existing risk methodologies, models, assumptions, and analytical frameworks.
• Develop recommendations for risk factor identification, weighting methodologies, and risk scoring approaches.
• Perform root-cause analysis and consequence modeling to understand safety impacts.
• Validate risk models using historical data, operational data, enterprise systems, partner datasets, and expert judgment.
• Assess model performance and identify opportunities for refinement and continuous improvement.
• Support development of risk-ranking methodologies that categorize regulated entities and activities according to relative safety risk.
• Collaborate with engineers, analysts, program managers, and government stakeholders to implement risk-based solutions.
• Translate complex analytical findings into technical reports, briefings, decision papers, and executive-level recommendations.
• Develop documentation supporting implementation of risk models, including processes, procedures, methodologies, and user guidance.
• Participate in technical meetings, working sessions, and stakeholder discussions with PHMSA leadership and program offices.
• Review technical deliverables to ensure analytical rigor, accuracy, and defensibility.