Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Knights of Columbus is a tax-exempt Catholic fraternal benefit society focused on providing financial security and supporting charitable missions. They are seeking a Senior Applied AI & Data Scientist to design, build, evaluate, and deploy AI-powered solutions that drive measurable business outcomes across various sectors including Life Insurance and Investments.
Responsibilities
- Own end-to-end delivery of AI solutions from problem framing and exploratory analysis through production deployment and measurement
- Design and deliver LLM-enabled analytics and 'Deep Research' capabilities using RAG over structured and unstructured enterprise data
- Build agentic workflows and multi-step orchestration (tool use, function calling, retrieval, and guardrails) to automate business processes
- Develop and deploy advanced statistical and machine learning models supporting insurance, actuarial, claims, risk, and investment decision-making
- Engineer features and context: build reusable feature pipelines, embeddings, vector search patterns, and semantic/metadata strategies
- Define success criteria and evaluation plans: offline tests, human-in-the-loop review, and online measurement (A/B or phased rollout)
- Productionize and operate models: partner with engineers to implement CI/CD, monitoring, drift detection, prompt/version management, and incident response runbooks
- Apply responsible AI practices consistently: bias and fairness assessment, transparency, documentation (model cards), and audit-ready controls
- Communicate insights and tradeoffs clearly to executives and technical teams (risk, compliance, security) and influence decisions with data
- Contribute to reusable standards and patterns for MLOps/LLMOps across the enterprise (templates, libraries, and governance checklists)
Skills
- Strong Python and SQL skills; experience with ML libraries (e.g., scikit-learn, XGBoost, PyTorch/TensorFlow) and data science best practices
- Hands-on experience with Snowflake (Snowpark and/or Cortex) and relational databases such as PostgreSQL
- Experience with vector search/embeddings and knowledge retrieval patterns; familiarity with vector databases and hybrid search
- Experience partnering with engineering on production services (APIs, batch/stream pipelines), monitoring, and CI/CD
- Ability to define and run robust evaluation for models/LLMs (quality, safety, performance, cost) and translate into business KPIs
- 6+ years delivering advanced analytics and machine learning solutions, including production deployment
- 2+ years delivering GenAI/LLM solutions (RAG, agents, evaluation/guardrails) in an enterprise environment
- Financial services experience (life insurance, annuities, investments preferred) and familiarity with regulated model governance
- Experience with legacy-to-cloud data modernization (e.g., IBM DB2 extracts) and integration tools (e.g., Talend) where relevant
- Experience with ML lifecycle tooling (e.g., MLflow or equivalent), containerization (Docker), and API frameworks (FastAPI/Flask)
Benefits
- 13 paid holidays per year in addition to vacation and paid sick leave, and flexible workweek schedules.
- Certifications, designation, and tuition reimbursement.
- 401(k) retirement savings plan with matching company contributions, and cash balance retirement plans fully funded by the company.
- Short-term disability and term life insurance fully paid for by the company;
- Up to 12 weeks of childbirth leave under STD policy.
- One week of fully paid parental leave for all new parents, including adoptive and foster parents.
- A variety of health insurance options, including premium-level family coverage and a pre-tax Health Savings Account with employer contributions.
- Long-term disability insurance;
- Dental insurance;
- Vision insurance;
- Health club membership reimbursement;
- Employee Assistance Program
Company Overview