Senior Director, Data Science and AI Agents

Position Overview

The Senior Director of Data Science leads the technical vision, strategy, and execution for AI capabilities that power Asurion's next-generation customer experience. This role provides deep technical direction across production AI systems including conversational virtual agents, real-time agent assist, and intelligent routing.

Essential Job Skills/Duties

• Define the long-term AI technology vision and three-year roadmap across virtual agents, agent assist, and intelligent routing, including build-versus-buy decisions.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship to a team of ~20 experienced data scientists and ML/GenAI practitioners, raising engineering and scientific rigor.
• Lead AI architecture decisions spanning LLMs, RAG, agentic AI, evaluation frameworks, orchestration, and production deployment.
• Drive customer-facing virtual agents that gather information, resolve issues, detect sentiment, avoid hallucinations, and seamlessly escalate with full conversational context.
• Deliver real-time AI agent assist capabilities including knowledge retrieval, next-best action, desktop guidance, call summarization, and sales recommendations.
• Develop predictive routing and decision intelligence that matches customers to the optimal resource using intent, history, agent skills, and business outcomes.
• Establish standards for AI evaluation, hallucination mitigation, observability, LLMOps, Responsible AI, and continuous experimentation.
• Continuously evaluate emerging AI research, vendors, and platforms to ensure Asurion adopts scalable technologies and avoids dead-end architectures.
• Represent Asurion externally through industry events, technical conferences, and thought leadership while building relationships across the AI ecosystem.

Required Technical Skills

• Deep expertise in Large Language Models (LLMs), agentic AI, conversational AI, and voice AI.
• Production experience with RAG, prompt engineering, AI evaluation, guardrails, hallucination mitigation, and LLMOps.
• Strong background in machine learning, predictive modeling, optimization, recommendation systems, and intelligent routing.
• Experience evaluating foundation models and AI vendors and making build- versus-buy technology recommendations.
• Cloud AI platforms and modern AI frameworks.
• Production AI architecture, experimentation, monitoring, and governance.

Required Soft/Leadership Skills

• Recognized technical thought leader with the ability to communicate complex AI concepts to executives, customers, and industry audiences.
• Technical coaching and mentorship for senior data scientists and ML practitioners.
• Strategic technology planning and architectural decision making.
• Cross-functional influence with Product and Engineering organizations.
• Executive presence and public speaking at conferences and customer events.

Required Education & Experience

• Advanced degree in Computer Science, AI, Machine Learning, Statistics, or related field, or equivalent experience.
• 12+ years leading applied AI, machine learning, or data science teams delivering production systems.
• Experience defining enterprise AI strategies and technology roadmaps.
• Experience partnering with software engineering organizations to deploy AI products at scale.

Preferred Education & Experience

• PhD or Master's in AI, Computer Science, Machine Learning, or related discipline.
• Experience leading AI organizations within product development environments.
• Recognized contributions to the AI community through publications, conference presentations, open-source projects, or industry leadership.

Preferred Licenses/Certifications

• AI/ML certifications from major cloud providers or leading AI platforms.
• Demonstrated expertise in production AI, LLMOps, or Responsible AI frameworks.