Senior Data Scientist

About the role

As a Senior Data Scientist, you will make an impact by engineering modern businesses to improve everyday life. You will be instrumental in driving new product development within a collaborative team environment, writing production code in both run-time and build-time environments. You will be a valued member of the AI and Analytics team and work collaboratively with Managers, team members and clients.

• Develop and implement LLM-based applications tailored for in-house legal needs, ensuring they align with Cognizant's commitment to excellence and innovation
• Evaluate and maintain our data assets and training/evaluation datasets, ensuring they meet the highest standards of integrity and quality.
• Design and build pipelines for preprocessing, annotating, and managing legal document datasets, fostering a customer-centric mindset.
• Collaborate with legal experts to understand requirements and ensure models meet domain-specific needs, working as one team.
• Conduct experiments and evaluate model performance to drive continuous improvements, raising the bar in all deliverables.
• Evaluate AI/ML and GenAI outcomes, both human and automated, to ensure accuracy, reliability, and alignment with business objectives.

Work model: Hybrid

We believe hybrid work is the way forward as we strive to provide flexibility wherever possible. Based on this role’s business requirements, this is a hybrid position requiring 3 days a week in a client or Cognizant office in Raleigh, NC. Regardless of your working arrangement, we are here to support a healthy work-life balance through our various wellbeing programs.

The working arrangements for this role are accurate as of the date of posting. This may change based on the project you’re engaged in, as well as business and client requirements. Rest assured; we will always be clear about role expectations.

• Strong hands-on experience and foundations in machine learning, including dimensionality reduction, clustering, embeddings, and sequence classification algorithms.
• Experience with deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch, Tensor Flow, and Hugging Face Transformers.
• Practical experience in Natural Language Processing methods and libraries such as spaCy, word2vec, Tensor Flow, Keras, PyTorch, Flair, BERT.
• Practical experience with large language models, prompt engineering, fine-tuning, and benchmarking using frameworks such as Lang Chain and Llama Index.
• Strong Python background.
• Knowledge of AWS, GCP, Azure, or other cloud platforms.
• Understanding of data modeling principles and complex data models.
• Proficiency with relational and No
  
  SQL databases as well as vector stores (e.g., Postgres, Elasticsearch/Open Search, Chroma
  
  DB).

• Knowledge of Scala, Spark, Ray, or other distributed computing systems is highly preferred.
• Knowledge of API development, containerization, and machine learning deployment is highly preferred.
• Experience with ML Ops/AI Ops is highly preferred.

We're excited to meet people who share our mission and can make an impact in a variety of ways. Don't hesitate to apply, even if you only meet the minimum requirements listed. Think about your transferable experiences and unique skills that make you stand out as someone who can bring new and exciting things to this role.

Please note, this role is not able to offer visa transfer or sponsorship now or in the future.

Salary and Other Compensation:
Applications will be accepted until Feb 28 2026. The annual salary for this position is between $120,000 - $150,000 USD depending on experience and other qualifications of the successful candidate. This position is also eligible for Cognizant’s discretionary annual incentive program, based on performance and subject to the terms of Cognizant’s applicable plans.

Benefits:
Cognizant offers the following benefits for this position, subject to applicable eligibility requirements:
Medical/Dental/Vision/Life Insurance;
Paid holidays plus Paid Time Off; 401(k) plan and contributions;
Long-term/Short-term Disability;
Paid Parental Leave;
Employee Stock Purchase Plan.

Disclaimer:
The salary, other compensation, and benefits information is accurate as of the date of this posting. Cognizant reserves the right to modify this information at any time, subject to applicable law.