Lead Data Scientist (GenAI)

Job Description

Norfolk Southern Corporation is seeking a Lead Data Scientist (GenAI) to join our enterprise AI team. This role focuses on developing, optimizing, and enhancing intelligent solutions using Generative AI technologies, including Large Language Models (LLMs), Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers. The ideal candidate will partner with technical and business leaders across the enterprise to deliver scalable, secure, and high-performing AI capabilities that drive business value. The position involves working with cloud-based platforms, modern AI/ML frameworks, and collaborating across business units to solve complex problems.

What kind of problems do we solve?

• Document Intelligence: Analyze and extract insights from thousands of corporate documents, reports, and operational data using advanced NLP techniques.
• Conversational AI: Build intelligent chat systems that help employees retrieve information and interact with enterprise data.
• GenAI Solutions: Creating and deploying Generative AI models for document processing, visual data analysis, and natural language understanding.
• Model Context Protocol (MCP): Enhance AI agent capabilities through custom tool integrations and context-aware servers.

Responsibilities

• Lead design and architecture of enterprise GenAI solutions tailored to business use cases.
• Design modular, framework-agnostic LLM pipelines using libraries such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, or similar.
• Define prompting strategies, agent patterns, and RAG architectures. Ensure approaches are scalable, reusable company-wide and drive adoption across teams.
• Oversee lifecycle of use cases: Development to Deployment to Production and MLops.
• Evaluate emerging AI trends and help guide the adoption of high-value innovations.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to understand business needs and deliver configurable, scalable solutions.

Education Required

• Bachelor’s in computer science, data science, machine learning, NLP, AI, linguistics, or related field required.

Skills Required

• 4-7+ years of experience in Data Science, Machine Learning, NLP or AI positions.
• Extensive background in building, finetuning and operationalizing large language models (LLMs) in production environment.
• Proficiency in Python, including libraries such as Scikit-learn, PyTorch, Pandas, NumPy, spaCy, NLTK, and Matplotlib.
• Skilled in SQL, NoSQL, Milvus, Pinecone, PGVector databases.

Skills Preferred

• Advanced degree, e.g., Ph.D. or M.S. computer science, data science, machine learning, NLP, AI, linguistics, or related field preferred.
• Highly experienced in creating Agentic LLMs and knowledge of orchestration frameworks such as LangGraph.
• NLP and AI/ML Frameworks: Experience with training NLP models from scratch, working with Large Language Models, and using libraries such as spaCy, NLTK, and Transformers.
• Highly experienced with cloud platforms, preferably AWS (ECS, S3, Lambda, Bedrock, OpenSearch), Databricks, and Datadog.
• DevOps knowledge: Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD, Git, Terraform.

Work Conditions

• Environment: Hybrid 2-3 days on-site and remote work 3-2 days per week.
• Shift Work: No
• On-Call: No
• Weekend Work: No