Principal AI & Analytics Leader for Energy Ops

1200 Equinor ASA; Houston (TX); On-site; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Job summary

Equinor is seeking a Principal Data Scientist to lead complex AI initiatives in Houston within Design, Software and Data Science. You will bridge ML, optimization, reinforcement learning, and agentic AI to deliver safe, scalable business solutions with measurable value.

You will guide problem framing, set priorities, and align stakeholders while coaching teams on advanced AI topics and responsible AI practices.

Qualifications

• Master's or PhD in operations research, applied mathematics, computer science, data science, control/automation, engineering or a related discipline.
• Solid experience with production-grade AI/ML delivery, including data pipelines, model evaluation and secure deployment.
• Ability to translate ambiguous business questions into analytical problems and action plans.
• Strong depth in ML, optimization, RL, decision science, or advanced AI with complex problem solving.
• Experience leading technical tasks or work packages with multiple contributors and stakeholders.
• Strong stakeholder management and communication skills; ability to influence across disciplines.
• Sound judgement on risk, safety, ethics, compliance and commercial value when applying AI.
• Domain understanding from energy production, logistics, power systems, or other complex industrial settings.

Responsibilities

• Drive complex AI deliveries from problem framing to implemented solutions with clear scope and stakeholder alignment.
• Provide professional support addressing key business issues by linking optimization, RL, forecasting and agentic AI to decisions.
• Design for bounded autonomy, confidence signaling, human oversight and safe rollback paths.
• Improve performance and cost efficiency across development, evaluation and inference using scalable serving and model routing.
• Combine agentic AI with optimization or RL for planning and decision support.
• Coach and advise colleagues on complex AI topics and new technologies.

Skills

AI/ML delivery

Problem framing

Stakeholder management

Risk and ethics

Industrial/enterprise context

Communication

Education

Master's or PhD in OR/Math/CS/Data Science

Tools

Azure

Databricks

Kubernetes

Python

CI/CD

MLflow

Job description

Equinor is seeking a Principal Data Scientist to lead complex AI initiatives in Houston within Design, Software and Data Science. You will bridge ML, optimization, reinforcement learning, and agentic AI to deliver safe, scalable business solutions with measurable value.

You will guide problem framing, set priorities, and align stakeholders while coaching teams on advanced AI topics and responsible AI practices.