Lead Data Scientist

Responsibilities

• Drive end to end design of Agentic AI solutions that orchestrate autonomous workflows and deliver measurable business outcomes for global stakeholders in a hybrid work environment.
• Develop robust NLP models that extract insights from large scale multilingual text data to improve decision making and enhance customer experience across multiple channels.
• Architect and implement open source LLM based solutions that are optimized for latency scalability and cost efficiency while maintaining strong performance on enterprise use cases.
• Guide design of generative AI applications that create high quality content recommendations and summaries while adhering to responsible AI and data privacy standards.
• Establish reusable frameworks, prompts, and evaluation methods that enable teams to rapidly prototype and productize Agentic AI and generative AI capabilities.
• Collaborate with product managers, architects, and engineering teams to translate complex business needs into technical AI roadmaps and backlog items with clear acceptance criteria.
• Review data pipelines, feature stores, and model serving infrastructure to ensure that AI solutions remain reliable, observable, and maintainable in production environments.
• Perform rigorous experimentation, benchmarking, and error analysis on LLMs and NLP models to continuously improve accuracy, robustness, and fairness across user segments.
• Document solution designs, experiment findings, model cards, and operational runbooks in a clear and comprehensive manner to support maintainability and audit readiness.
• Collaborate with risk, legal, and compliance partners to embed governance, model monitoring, and ethical AI practices throughout the solution lifecycle.
• Mentor senior data scientists and machine learning engineers through code reviews, design discussions, and knowledge sharing on Agentic AI, NLP, and LLM best practices.
• Engage with business stakeholders to explain complex AI behaviors, manage expectations, and ensure that deployed solutions create transparent value for the organization and society.
• Evaluate emerging open source LLMs, frameworks, and tooling to recommend pragmatic adoption paths that align with enterprise security, cost, and performance requirements.

Qualifications

• Exhibit extensive hands-on experience in designing and deploying Agentic AI systems that coordinate multiple tools or services to complete complex business tasks.
• Show proven track record in implementing and fine-tuning open source LLMs using approaches such as instruction tuning, parameter-efficient methods, and retrieval augmentation.
• Utilize solid programming skills in languages like Python along with experience in machine learning libraries and deep learning frameworks appropriate for large models.
• Employ sound knowledge of data engineering fundamentals including data quality, feature engineering, and MLOps practices for reliable model deployment and monitoring.
• Combine strong analytical thinking and problem-solving abilities with clear communication skills that make complex AI concepts accessible to diverse stakeholders.
• Apply understanding of responsible AI principles including bias detection, explainability, privacy preservation, and human oversight in all AI design decisions.
• Maintain awareness of current research and industry trends in Agentic AI, NLP, LLMs, and generative AI and translate relevant advances into practical enterprise solutions.

Pay

The annual salary for this position is between $150,000 - $160,000 depending on experience and other qualifications of the successful candidate.

Benefits

Cognizant offers the following benefits for this position, subject to applicable eligibility requirements:

• Medical, Dental & Vision Insurance
• 401(k) with Company Match
• Employee Stock Purchase Program
• Paid Time Off & Holidays
• Paid Parental Leave
• Short-Term & Long-Term Disability Coverage
• Employee Assistance Program (EAP)
• Mental Health & Wellbeing Programs
• Health Advocacy & Virtual Care Services

Disclaimer: The salary, other compensation, and benefits information is accurate as of the date of this posting. Cognizant reserves the right to modify this information at any time, subject to applicable law.