Data Science Consultant - AI COE

Why This Role Matters

AI is transforming how Securian operates and serves customers. As a Data Scientist Consultant, you'll be at the forefront of that change, designing and delivering models that enable smarter, faster, and more personalized experiences. You'll help bridge the gap between business needs and AI innovation, advancing our Win with Purpose strategy by turning data into enterprise-wide value.

Key Responsibilities

• Partner with business teams to identify, scope, and prioritize AI use cases with the highest potential value, ensuring alignment with strategic goals and measurable business outcomes.
• Translate business challenges into analytical frameworks, defining hypotheses, selecting data sources, and identifying the right modeling approaches to solve real-world problems.
• Design, develop, and deploy advanced machine learning, NLP, and AI models that address complex business problems across areas such as claims, underwriting, marketing, customer experience, and operations.
• Build and optimize models that automate data extraction, classification, and summarization, applying Large Language Models (LLMs), prompt engineering, and advanced analytics to improve efficiency and insight generation.
• Evaluate, test, and validate models, ensuring accuracy, robustness, fairness, and explainability consistent with regulatory, ethical, and enterprise standards.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with AI Engineers, Machine Learning and Data Engineers, and technology teams to operationalize and monitor production models, ensuring reliability, scalability, and compliance with responsible AI practices.
• Communicate insights and recommendations effectively through clear storytelling and visualization tailored to both technical and business audiences.
• Drive adoption and continuous improvement, helping business teams apply AI solutions confidently and incorporating feedback to refine models and approaches.
• Stay current on emerging advancements in AI, ML, and NLP, applying new techniques to accelerate delivery and enhance solution quality.
• Mentor and support peers, fostering a culture of learning, experimentation, and best practices within the AI CoE and broader data science community.

Required Qualifications

• Hands-on experience designing and implementing machine learning models and AI solutions in production environments.
• Strong programming skills in Python, with proficiency in libraries such as Scikit-learn, TensorFlow, PyTorch, or similar.
• Proven ability to translate business problems into data science solutions and communicate technical results effectively.
• Experience with data wrangling, feature engineering, model evaluation, and MLOps practices.
• Understanding of model explainability, interpretability, and ethical AI principles.
• Familiarity with cloud-based data science platforms (AWS SageMaker, Azure ML, or GCP Vertex AI).
• A growth mindset and enthusiasm for learning new techniques, technologies, and tools.

Preferred Qualifications

• Master's or PhD in Data Science, Computer Science, Statistics, Mathematics, or related field.
• 4+ years of applied data science experience, with a record of successful model delivery in business settings.
• Experience with Natural Language Processing (NLP), Large Language Models (LLMs), prompt engineering, or Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG).
• Familiarity with cloud environments (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and MLOps pipelines.
• Exposure to data pipeline orchestration tools such as Apache Airflow, StreamSets, or Control-M.
• Understanding of data governance, privacy, and model risk management frameworks.
• Experience in insurance, financial services, or other highly regulated industries.

For more information regarding Securian's benefits, please review our Benefits page.

This information is not intended to explain all the provisions of coverage available under these plans. In all cases, the plan document dictates coverage and provisions.

Securian Financial Group, Inc. does not discriminate based on race, color, religion, national origin, sex, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, marital or familial status, pregnancy, disability, genetic information, political affiliation, veteran status, status in regard to public assistance or any other protected status. If you are a job seeker with a disability and require an accommodation to apply for one of our jobs, please contact us by email at Employment@Securian.com, by telephone 651-655-5522 (voice), or 711 (Relay/TTY).

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