Senior Data Scientist: Generative AI & LLM Engineer

Cognizant; Chicago (IL); On-site; USD 133,000 - 157,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical/Dental/Vision/Life Insurance

Paid holidays plus PTO

401(k) plan and contributions

Disability insurance (Long-term/Short)

Paid Parental Leave

Employee Stock Purchase Plan

Job summary

Cognizant is seeking a Senior Data Scientist with strong expertise in Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA), Machine Learning (ML), Generative AI, and Large Language Models (LLMs). This role designs, tunes, evaluates, and deploys enterprise AI/ML solutions while contributing to the AI architecture roadmap.

You will work with data engineers and product teams to translate requirements into scalable AI systems, build RAG apps, fine-tune LLMs, and ensure production readiness, governance, and responsible

Qualifications

• 6+ years in Data Science or AI roles.

Responsibilities

• Perform advanced Exploratory Data Analysis and statistical analysis to identify patterns, relationships, anomalies, and actionable business insights.
• Design, develop, evaluate, and deploy machine learning models for predictive analytics, classification, regression, forecasting, and other enterprise use cases.
• Build Generative AI and LLM-based solutions, including RAG applications, AI agents, enterprise search, and knowledge-driven AI systems.
• Fine-tune, profile, benchmark, and optimize LLMs for model quality, latency, accuracy, scalability, and cost efficiency.
• Design model evaluation frameworks covering performance, relevance, hallucination, safety, robustness, and business effectiveness.
• Contribute to end-to-end AI/ML architecture across cloud and on-premises environments, including model serving, data pipelines, and integration patterns.
• Develop and operationalize MLOps/LLMOps pipelines for experimentation, versioning, deployment, monitoring, and continuous model improvement.
• Evaluate AI/ML frameworks, foundation models, vector databases, and emerging technologies based on business and technical requirements.
• Collaborate with data engineers, AI engineers, architects, product teams, and business stakeholders to translate requirements into scalable AI solutions.
• Ensure AI solutions follow enterprise security, data governance, responsible AI, and production-readiness standards.

Skills

EDA & statistics

Machine learning

RAG & LLM tuning

AI architectures knowledge

Communication & collaboration

Problem solving

Tools

Python

Pandas

NumPy

Scikit-learn

PyTorch

TensorFlow

LLM fine-tuning

Azure

AWS

GCP

MLOps/LLMOps

Vector databases

Embeddings

Job description

Cognizant is seeking a Senior Data Scientist with strong expertise in Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA), Machine Learning (ML), Generative AI, and Large Language Models (LLMs). This role designs, tunes, evaluates, and deploys enterprise AI/ML solutions while contributing to the AI architecture roadmap.

You will work with data engineers and product teams to translate requirements into scalable AI systems, build RAG apps, fine-tune LLMs, and ensure production readiness, governance, and responsible