Brief Role Description

This position is Career Level 30P located in Reston, VA with a Role Classification of Hybrid.

Role Summary

The role resides within VWFS’s Data Science & AI CoE team and is a key player in providing analytical insights, models, and analytical direction to shape the future strategy of VWFS’s Mobility transformation.  

The Principal Data Scientist will lead high-impact initiatives that directly contribute to VWFS’s stated goal to become a data and AI-driven organization. Potential projects cover the entire spectrum of automotive finance, from automated decision-making to fraud detection and business process improvement.

Responsibilities within this Role

•    Lead data science product development, set standards, best practices, and innovation for the data science CoE (25%)
•    Experimentation, build, integration of data science solutions into core business processes and new opportunities (75%)
Responsibilities will include:

•    Definition and ongoing improvement of a machine learning environment 
•    Develop and deploy AI models that impact business decisions 
•    Establish best practices and governance routines to ensure adherence to model management policies, peer reviews, and compliance to our policy standards for privacy, ethics, and bias.
•    Bring relevant data science techniques, algorithms, and tools to your team 
•    Provide technical oversight, help and mentorship to the junior data scientists on the team 
•    Apply suitable techniques for model testing and tuning, to assess accuracy, fit, validity, and robustness
•    Innovate new ML methods in the data science space and drive change throughout the business 
•    Contributes to code documentation, maintains playbooks, and provides timely progress updates
•    Help generate compelling hypotheses to drive new business creation

Qualification requirements

Required Education:

•    Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Statistics, Economics, Engineering, Operations Research or similar quantitative field
•    Master’s degree in Computer Science, Statistics, Economics, Engineering, Operations Research or similar quantitative field

Relevant Experience:

•    12+ years of data & analytics work experience with 8+ years in data science
•    7+ years in utilizing methods and tools to extract, curate, explore, and analyze data from large data sources
•    7+ years in developing, integrating and deploying machine learning solutions into the business decision making process
•    7+ years in leveraging algorithms, tune parameters and back testing validation
•    5+ years leading ML project development

Skills:

•    Collaborate with product owners and product managers to translate business requirements into impactful AI solutions that scale
•    Build, integrate and deploy machine learning solutions into the business decision-making process
•    Thorough knowledge of machine learning models, including both traditional ML and GenAI
•    Utilize a consultative approach to work with the business to solve challenging problems using various analytical techniques
•    Embrace, research, explore, and enable new quantitative techniques and technologies in data science that will help define VWFS as an industry leader in the application of data science techniques

•    Extensive experience with model evaluation and solid grasp of A/B testing and causal analysis
•    Research new data sources and analytical tools, contribute to new application development, and data quality improvement efforts
•    Ability to originate curiosity to collaborate with different business units to co-create solutions
•    Passion for data analysis and problem solving
•    Establishes and maintains effective performance tracking; identifies improvement opportunity, form hypothesis, propose, design and implement tests to drive strategy enhancement and optimization.
•    Superior ability to communicate technical ideas and results to non-technical users in written and verbal form