Head of Data Science — Conversational AI

Vanguard; Philadelphia (Philadelphia County); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Visa sponsorship

Hybrid work model

Job summary

Vanguard seeks an experienced Data Scientist/AI leader to spearhead a team delivering traditional and agentic AI/ML capabilities for enterprise conversational AI across voice, chat, and emerging agentic experiences. You will set priorities, provide technical direction, coach talent, and ensure high-quality execution.

You will drive the full AI lifecycle from problem formulation and experimentation to deployment readiness, production measurement, and continuous optimization, while leading the

Qualifications

• 8+ years of data science or applied AI experience with leadership exposure.
• Strong foundation in ML, including supervised/unsupervised learning, feature engineering, modeling, evaluation, experimentation, and measurement.
• Expertise in NLP and Generative AI with understanding of transformer architectures, embeddings, LLMs, prompting, retrieval-augmented generation, and modern language-model development patterns.
• Hands-on experience designing and evaluating agentic AI systems, including orchestration/routing, knowledge retrieval, multi-turn dialogue, and agent evaluation.
• Strong Python and data-analysis skills; familiar with large datasets and ML libraries.
• Experience with AI/ML evaluation and observability, including evaluation datasets, metrics, benchmarks, automated evaluations, production monitoring, failure analysis, and mapping model behavior to outcomes.
• Ability to translate ambiguous problems into hypotheses and measurable success criteria; balance technical depth with business context.
• Proven ability to lead and develop data scientists, set standards, and foster accountability, learning, and experimentation.
• Strong communication skills to explain complex AI concepts to Product, Engineering, Analytics, Risk, and senior stakeholders.
• Undergraduate degree in a quantitative field; advanced degree preferred.

Responsibilities

• Manage a team of data scientists and deliver traditional and agentic AI/ML capabilities for enterprise conversational AI across voice and chat.
• Drive the full AI lifecycle from problem formulation through deployment, monitoring, and optimization.
• Lead development and optimization of agentic and traditional AI solutions, including NLP, LLM-based applications, and knowledge retrieval.
• Advance evaluation and production intelligence for conversational AI with rigorous methods for accuracy, reliability, and outcomes.
• Develop scalable evaluation approaches to identify failure modes, benchmark solutions, and support evidence-based release decisions.
• Translate business problems into measurable DS problems and scalable AI solutions with stakeholders across Product, Engineering, Architecture, UX, Analytics, and Risk.
• Establish technical standards and best practices for model development, evaluation, observability, explainability, and responsible AI use.
• Drive continuous improvement of conversational and agentic systems by leveraging evaluation signals for iterations and measurable outcomes.
• Stay current with AI advances and evaluate emerging methods, models, and architectures.

Skills

Data Science

Machine Learning

NLP

Generative AI

Agentic AI

Python

Experimentation

Stakeholder management

Communication

Leadership

Education

Bachelor's or higher in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, Statistics or related quantitative field

Job description

Vanguard seeks an experienced Data Scientist/AI leader to spearhead a team delivering traditional and agentic AI/ML capabilities for enterprise conversational AI across voice, chat, and emerging agentic experiences. You will set priorities, provide technical direction, coach talent, and ensure high-quality execution.

You will drive the full AI lifecycle from problem formulation and experimentation to deployment readiness, production measurement, and continuous optimization, while leading the