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AI/ML Principal Data Scientist

VDart

 

Raleigh, NC, USA

Posted On: 5 days ago
Experience: 10+ years
Availability: Onsite
Openings: 1
Category: Principal Data Scientist
Tenure: Contract - Corp-to-Corp
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Description

Responsibilities:

  • Serve as the principal technical authority for Machine Learning and GenAI initiatives.
  • Define and communicate technical roadmaps, architectural direction, and long-term AI strategy.
  • Evaluate legacy systems and platforms, identifying technical constraints, risks, dependencies, and modernization opportunities.
  • Make high-impact technical decisions that guide engineering teams and influence platform evolution.
  • Lead and design POCs to validate new ML, GenAI, tooling, frameworks, and architectural approaches.
  • Assess feasibility, scalability, integration requirements, and operational considerations before broader adoption.
  • Translate experimental results into clear architectural recommendations and implementation direction.
  • Understand complex backend systems, data flows, APIs, microservices, integrations, and legacy codebases.
  • Bridge historical system architecture with future-state ML and AI capabilities.
  • Partner closely with engineering and architecture teams to ensure strategic decisions align with implementation realities.
  • Guide the design and delivery of LLM, RAG, hybrid retrieval, and agentic workflow patterns.
  • Define experimentation and evaluation strategies for AI systems.
  • Establish quality metrics and monitoring approaches that identify degradation in AI system performance.
  • Determine how AI results should be measured, improved, and continuously tuned.
  • Guide decisions around dataset chunking, embedding strategies, pre-filtering, keyword augmentation, semantic search, hybrid retrieval, reranking, and intelligence thresholds.
  • Help establish golden datasets and evaluation approaches that define target system performance.
  • Evaluate agentic systems and determine appropriate quality metrics and supervision mechanisms.
  • Maintain awareness of emerging agentic frameworks and determine where new approaches can provide architectural value.
  • Provide technical leadership across engineering, product, platform, and architecture teams.

Qualifications:

  • 10+ years of overall technology experience.
  • Early-career experience as a Software Engineer / Developer.
  • 5+ years of experience in Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, or Generative AI.
  • Strong foundation in Java and/or Python, including the ability to read, understand, and assess legacy code.
  • Experience with or willingness to learn Go and other modern software languages.
  • Advanced experience with ML, AI, or GenAI at the architectural and system-design level.
  • Strong understanding of backend engineering, microservices, APIs, system design, and data-driven architectures.
  • Strong cloud computing and distributed-systems knowledge.
  • Experience with LLMs, RAG, hybrid retrieval, and agentic workflows.
  • Strong understanding of experimentation, evaluation, benchmarking, and production monitoring for AI systems.
  • Ability to make technical decisions at scale without direct ownership of day-to-day coding.
  • Demonstrated technical leadership without direct people-management responsibilities.
  • Ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.

Preferred Qualifications:

  • Strong Python and Java experience with working familiarity in Go, shell scripting, Git/GitHub, Docker, Kubernetes, and Helm.
  • AWS experience, particularly EKS, cloud deployment patterns, and GitOps workflows.
  • Experience with CI/CD and modern software delivery practices.
  • Experience designing production-oriented RAG and agentic AI systems.
  • Experience with vector/embedding strategies, hybrid search, reranking, semantic search, and retrieval evaluation.
  • Experience developing golden datasets and evaluation frameworks for AI systems.
  • Experience determining quality metrics for monitoring AI/agentic system degradation.
  • Experience working with complex legacy modernization initiatives

Education

Bachelor's degree

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