Principal Data Scientist - Gen AI & Agentic AI

At Niagara, we’re looking for Team Members who want to be part of achieving our mission to provide our customers the highest quality most affordable bottled water.

Consider applying here, if you want to:

• Work in an entrepreneurial and dynamic environment with a chance to make an impact.
• Develop lasting relationships with great people.
• Have the opportunity to build a satisfying career.

We offer competitive compensation and benefits packages for our Team Members.

The Principal Scientist leads other scientists and engineers on Research & Development (R&D) initiatives in materials, design, and process. Focuses on long-term team and business growth. Strategizes, guides and performs innovative research. Interacts with other team members and teams to create new products and systems, improves line efficiency, quality, or enables other projects which add value to Niagara's core business or aids in creating new business directions.

• Lead the strategy, design, and delivery of enterprise‑grade GenAI and agentic AI solutions, driving the development of next‑generation agents, LLM‑powered applications, and hybrid GenAI/ML systems that improve decision‑making, automation, and operational efficiency across Niagara’s business units.
• Partner with senior business leaders, product management, and cross‑functional technology teams to translate ambiguous or complex business challenges into clear problem statements, measurable outcomes, and prioritized AI initiatives.
• Architect robust agentic systems, including multistep orchestration, tool‑use agents, retrieval‑augmented workflows, grounding layers, and guardrail frameworks that ensure reliability, safety, and domain accuracy.
• Design and implement scalable analytic and modeling approaches, including feature engineering, embedding strategies, retrieval pipelines, fine‑tuning, prompt engineering, supervised learning, and hybrid architectures combining classical ML with GenAI capabilities.
• Develop, prototype, and operationalize LLM‑driven solutions using enterprise platforms such as Azure OpenAI, Databricks, Snowflake Cortex, Oracle AI Agent Studio, and containerized microservices.
• Build reusable, interpretable, and production‑ready models, agents, and pipelines, ensuring they meet standards for scalability, observability, resilience, and maintainability.
• Establish and own Niagara’s LLMOps and agent lifecycle practices, including CI/CD for models and agents, monitoring, evaluation frameworks, prompt testing, drift detection, and continuous improvement workflows.
• Champion Responsible AI principles, embedding safety, fairness, explainability, privacy, security, grounding, and governance throughout the agent and model development lifecycle.
• Define technical standards and best practices for GenAI development, including vector database usage, evaluation frameworks, embeddings, data preparation workflows, and content grounding strategies.
• Collaborate with IT, data engineering, and platform teams to ensure required infrastructure–data access, compute environments, vector stores, APIs, and application integration layers are in place for scalable deployment.
• Influence executive stakeholders by crafting compelling narratives, visualizations, and recommendations that communicate complex AI concepts in business‑relevant terms and drive strategic alignment.
• Coach, mentor, and uplift the technical capabilities of data scientists and senior individual contributors, providing thought leadership, code reviews, architectural guidance, and development plans.
• Drive innovation initiatives and proofs‑of‑concept, evaluating emerging GenAI frameworks, agent orchestration tools, evaluation stacks, retrieval technologies, and model families.
• Contribute to enterprise AI governance, including model/agent documentation, risk assessments, access control, versioning, testing standards, and audit readiness.
• Foster cross‑functional collaboration, identifying opportunities to leverage GenAI across manufacturing, supply chain, commercial operations, HR, legal, and corporate functions.
• Represent DDI as a subject‑matter expert for GenAI and agentic AI,…