Lead Applied Scientist — AI for Next Best Action

Humana, Inc.; Pierre (SD); Hybrid; USD 129,000 - 178,000; Full time

Job summary

Humana, Inc. is seeking a Lead Applied Scientist to design, develop, and scale intelligent decision systems powering our Next Best Action platform. You will own models end-to-end, from prototyping to deployment and monitoring, blending ML with decision science to improve member outcomes.

The role emphasizes production readiness, scalable pipelines, and collaboration with engineers and stakeholders across healthcare, with remote/hybrid work and travel as needed.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics, OR related quantitative field.
• 6+ years of professional experience in machine learning, applied science, decision science, or related engineering disciplines.
• Strong experience designing, developing, testing, deploying, and monitoring machine learning solutions in production environments.
• Solid understanding of reinforcement learning, sequential decision making, or other advanced decision‑making techniques.
• Strong Python programming skills and experience with machine learning frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow.
• Experience with distributed data processing and ML platforms such as Databricks, PySpark, Ray, or equivalent technologies.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals, including software architecture, code quality, automated testing, and scalable system design.
• Demonstrated ability to translate complex business problems into analytical models and production solutions.
• Demonstrated experience owning models across the full lifecycle, including prototyping, offline evaluation, simulation, testing, deployment, and production monitoring.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and improve machine learning and reinforcement learning models for personalized recommendations, sequential decision making, and policy learning.
• Apply decision science, operations research, and simulation techniques to formulate complex decision problems, evaluate alternatives, and improve outcomes under constraints.
• Develop and improve production ML pipelines using Python, PyTorch, Databricks, PySpark, Ray RLlib, and MLflow, enabling large-scale data processing, training, and inference.
• Design experiments, simulations, offline evaluations, and performance metrics to assess model effectiveness, policy behavior, and business impact before and after deployment.
• Own models and decision policies throughout their lifecycle, partnering with software engineering and platform teams to ensure scalable, reliable, observable production systems.
• Incorporate clinical eligibility, member preferences, business rules, and capacity constraints into intelligent decision-making processes.
• Provide technical direction on model architecture, algorithm selection, evaluation methods, and system design.

Skills

Python programming

PyTorch or TensorFlow

Reinforcement learning

ML pipelines

Software engineering

Decision science

Production deployment

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics, Operations Research, or related quantitative field

Tools

Databricks

PySpark

Ray

MLflow

Job description

Humana, Inc. is seeking a Lead Applied Scientist to design, develop, and scale intelligent decision systems powering our Next Best Action platform. You will own models end-to-end, from prototyping to deployment and monitoring, blending ML with decision science to improve member outcomes.

The role emphasizes production readiness, scalable pipelines, and collaboration with engineers and stakeholders across healthcare, with remote/hybrid work and travel as needed.