Lead Data Scientist (Remote)

About the Role

Hyatt Hotels Corporation seeks an enthusiastic Lead Data Scientist to join our AIML Team. In this role, you will collaborate closely with partners across ML Engineering, Data Engineering, Platform, Product, and Finance teams to continue making Hyatt a leading AIML-powered hospitality company. This is an individual contributor role with no direct people-management responsibilities, but you will provide technical leadership, mentor peers, influence architecture and product direction, and raise the overall technical bar for applied AI at Hyatt.

Responsibilities

• Design, prototype, and productionize Generative AI solutions in NL Search, Information Retrieval, and Recommender Systems.
• Build and evaluate LLM-powered applications, including retrieval-augmented generation, prompt engineering, fine-tuning, embeddings, semantic search, and agentic or workflow-based AI systems.
• Develop robust model evaluation frameworks, including offline metrics, human evaluation, guardrail testing, bias and safety checks, and business-impact measurement.
• Identify opportunities to apply AI to improve guest experiences, colleague productivity, operational efficiency, and commercial outcomes.
• Translate ambiguous business problems into clear data science problem statements, solution designs, success metrics, and implementation plans.
• Serve as a hands-on technical lead for high-impact AI and machine learning initiatives, leading solution design, modeling decisions, and experimentation strategy.
• Partner with ML engineering and data engineering teams to deploy scalable real-time inference pipelines and batch processing workflows.
• Influence technical roadmaps and help sequence data science initiatives based on business value, feasibility, risk, and team capacity.
• Mentor data scientists and ML practitioners through design reviews, code reviews, modeling best practices, and knowledge sharing.
• Collaborate with ML engineering to productionize models and Gen AI services using AWS-native tools and modern MLOps practices.
• Contribute to scalable ML system design, including data pipelines, feature workflows, model serving, observability, monitoring, and lifecycle management.
• Apply strong software engineering practices, including version control, CI/CD, testing, reproducibility, containerization, and documentation.
• Support deployment patterns for both batch and low-latency inference use cases.
• Partner with security, governance, architecture, and legal/privacy stakeholders to ensure AI systems are reliable, secure, compliant, and responsibly deployed.
• Work closely with product owners, data scientists, ML engineers, data engineers, architects, and business stakeholders to deliver end-to-end algorithmic products.
• Communicate model behavior, limitations, assumptions, risks, and business impact clearly to technical and non-technical audiences.
• Define measurable success criteria and help evaluate whether AI solutions are delivering intended outcomes.
• Champion responsible AI, inclusive design, and practical experimentation across projects.

Qualifications

• Master’s degree in computer science, Software Engineering, or related field. Ph.D preferred.
• 6+ years of experience in machine learning roles focused on areas such as NLP/NLU, reinforcement learning, or LLM applications, including 3+ years in a tech leadership role.
• Experience in fine-tuning and deploying LLMs or other Generative AI solutions to production.
• Expertise in AWS cloud services (e.g., SageMaker, ECS/EKS, Step Functions, Lambda, Glue).
• Strong programming skills in Python, with experience in SQL, PySpark, and containerization (e.g., Docker).
• Proven experience designing scalable data pipelines and ML systems for both real-time and batch inference.
• Deep understanding of responsible AI practices, CI/CD pipelines, Agile development practices, and model lifecycle management.
• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills, with a strong bias for action and collaboration.
• Familiarity with ML observability and governance tools.

Benefits

• Annual allotment of free hotel stays at Hyatt hotels globally.
• Flexible work schedule.
• Work-life benefits including wellbeing initiatives such as a complimentary Headspace subscription and a discount at the on-site fitness center.
• A global family assistance policy with paid time off following the birth or adoption of a child, as well as financial assistance for adoption.
• Paid Time Off, Medical, Dental, Vision, and 401K with company match.

Pay

The salary range for this position is $180,000 - $210,000. This position is also eligible to earn an annual bonus. The final pay rate/salary offered will depend on experience, skill level, and other qualifications for the role, as well as the location of the performance of work.