Data Scientist

Job Summary

Ameri Life is a national leader in insurance and financial services. Our AI & Data Science team is small, high-impact, and building a modern AI capability from the ground up on Databricks. You’ll ship production solutions — from predictive forecasting to AI agents — that directly transform how the business operates across our Health and Wealth verticals.

• Databricks-first platform — Lakehouse architecture with Unity Catalog, MLflow, and scalable compute
• Real AI work — design and deploy AI agents, RAG systems, and LLM-powered solutions in production
• End-to-end ownership — from problem framing through deployment and monitoring
• Direct business impact — work with business leaders on high-visibility initiatives
• Shape the future — influence technical direction, tooling, and best practices on a growing team

As a Data Scientist on our AI & Data Science team, you will partner with engineering, analytics, and business stakeholders to translate complex problems into scalable, production-ready solutions. Your work will span the full lifecycle — from exploratory analysis through model deployment and ongoing optimization. You will design and build predictive models for forecasting and optimization, develop intelligent automation using AI agents and large language models, engineer features and pipelines on the Databricks Lakehouse platform, and evaluate and iterate on both traditional ML and generative AI solutions to ensure they deliver reliable business value.

• Strong foundation in statistical modeling and ML, with experience selecting appropriate approaches for different business problems
• Proven experience building and validating time-series forecasting models in production environments
• Hands‑on expertise with ensemble/boosting algorithms (XGBoost, Light
  
  GBM) for structured data
• Experience with A/B testing design, hypothesis testing, and rigorous model evaluation techniques
• Comfort working with imperfect, real-world datasets — handling missing data, class imbalance, and feature drift
• Preferred: unsupervised learning, hierarchical/probabilistic forecasting, Bayesian methods, or causal inference
• Preferred: experience optimizing models for business ROI; exposure to reinforcement learning or advanced optimization

• Strong Python proficiency for data analysis, modeling, and production development
• Experience with Databricks notebooks, clusters, and workflows for data science and ML
• Working knowledge of PySpark for large-scale data processing and feature engineering
• Advanced SQL skills across Lakehouse architectures; experience with MLflow for experiment tracking and model registry
• Clean, testable code practices with Git-based version control (e.g., Databricks Repos, Git Hub)
• Preferred:
  Unity Catalog, Delta Lake/Delta Live Tables, medallion architecture patterns, Databricks Feature Store, model serving, workflow orchestration, or data quality frameworks
• Preferred: experience designing APIs for model serving; CI/CD for ML workflows

• Hands‑on cloud platform experience (Azure preferred; AWS/GCP also valued) with Docker containerization
• Understanding of cloud-native data architectures, distributed processing, and data governance/RBAC
• Preferred:
  Azure ecosystem experience (Data Factory, Azure AI Services, Azure OpenAI); MLOps practices and model monitoring
• Preferred certification:
  Azure Fundamentals or AWS Cloud Practitioner

• Hands‑on prompt engineering and LLM integration for production use cases
• Experience building or orchestrating AI agents and multi-step workflows (Lang Chain, Lang Graph, or similar)
• Ability to evaluate AI outputs systematically and implement guardrails for reliability and safety
• Strong judgment on when to apply traditional ML vs. generative AI and the trade‑offs involved
• Preferred: enterprise LLM experience (fine-tuning, evaluation, deployment); RAG architectures with vector databases and semantic search; NLP/text analytics; transformer architectures;
  Databricks Mosaic AI or foundation model APIs
• Preferred: structured AI evaluation…