Senior ML & GenAI Data Scientist – LLM/RAG

Cognizant; Bentonville (AR); On-site; USD 150,000 - 155,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical Insurance

Paid Time Off

401(k) Plan

Disability Insurance

Parental Leave

Employee Stock Purchase Plan

Job summary

Cognizant is seeking an experienced Data Scientist to lead production-grade ML and GenAI initiatives. You will work across the ML lifecycle from problem framing to deployment, with a strong emphasis on building GenAI/LLM-based applications and enterprise AI use cases.

Ideal candidates have 10+ years of experience, deep knowledge of ML engineering, and hands-on expertise with Python, ML frameworks, and cloud platforms.

Qualifications

• Strong hands-on experience in Data Science and Machine Learning.
• Strong programming skills in Python.
• Experience developing and productionizing ML models and ML pipelines.
• Strong understanding of Machine Learning Engineering (MLE) concepts.
• Hands-on experience with Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs).
• Experience with prompt engineering, RAG, embeddings, vector search, and LLM evaluation.
• Understanding of transformer architectures, NLP, and foundation models.
• Experience with ML/AI frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, scikit-learn, Hugging Face, or similar.
• Experience integrating LLMs into enterprise applications.
• Working knowledge of MLOps, model deployment, monitoring, versioning, and CI/CD concepts.
• Experience with cloud data/AI platforms such as AWS, Azure, or GCP.
• Strong understanding of statistics, experimentation, feature engineering, model selection, and evaluation.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and implement advanced ML and Data Science solutions for complex business problems.
• Build, train, evaluate, and optimize ML models using structured and unstructured data.
• Develop Generative AI and LLM-based applications, including conversational AI and knowledge assistants.
• Work with pre-trained LLMs and apply prompt engineering, RAG, fine-tuning, and evaluation.
• Design and implement Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) solutions leveraging enterprise data sources.
• Build robust data and ML pipelines to support model training, inference, and production deployment.
• Apply strong MLE principles to ensure models and AI applications are scalable, reliable, maintainable, and production-ready.
• Develop solutions using Python and commonly used ML/AI frameworks and libraries.
• Experiment with different models, architectures, prompts, retrieval strategies, and evaluation techniques.
• Implement appropriate LLM evaluation and monitoring approaches for accuracy, relevance, reliability, and performance.
• Collaborate with engineering, product, data, and business teams to translate business requirements into AI/ML solutions.
• Stay current with evolving developments in Generative AI, LLMs, Machine Learning, and MLOps.

Skills

Data Science and Machine Learning

Python

ML models and pipelines

Machine Learning Engineering (MLE)

Generative AI and LLMs

prompt engineering, RAG, embeddings, V

transformer architectures, NLP

ML frameworks: PyTorch, TensorFlow, sc

LLMs integration into enterprise apps

MLOps

AWS, Azure, GCP

Statistics and model evaluation

Tools

LangChain

LlamaIndex

Job description

Cognizant is seeking an experienced Data Scientist to lead production-grade ML and GenAI initiatives. You will work across the ML lifecycle from problem framing to deployment, with a strong emphasis on building GenAI/LLM-based applications and enterprise AI use cases.

Ideal candidates have 10+ years of experience, deep knowledge of ML engineering, and hands-on expertise with Python, ML frameworks, and cloud platforms.