Principal Associate, Data Scientist - Alternative Data Strategy

Capital One • McLean, VA

3d • $161,800 - $201,400 • Hybrid

About The Position

The Alternative Data Strategy team advances credit decisioning by integrating non-traditional datasets into US Card strategies. The Data Scientist evaluates emerging vendors and data products, engineers impactful features, builds scalable processing and monitoring systems, and serves as a data-domain expert advising users on dataset applications. The role also involves navigating risk governance for vendor models and building challenger models with new data to enhance existing models, in collaboration with cross-functional teams.

The Data Scientist partners with data scientists, software engineers, and product managers to deliver customer-focused products. Using technologies such as Python, Conda, AWS, H2O, and Spark, the role uncovers insights from large volumes of numeric and textual data and develops machine-learning models through design, training, evaluation, validation, and implementation. The position translates technical work into tangible business goals and is designated hybrid, subject to Capital One's policy for required on-site presence at the assigned office.

Requirements

• Currently hold or be pursuing a qualifying degree, with the degree obtained by the scheduled start date.
• Bachelor's degree in a quantitative field plus 5 years of experience performing data analytics; or a master's degree in a quantitative field or an MBA with a quantitative concentration plus 3 years of data analytics experience; or a PhD in a quantitative field.
• Experience developing, validating, and backtesting statistical models.
• Familiarity with interpreting confusion matrices and ROC curves.
• Experience with clustering, classification, sentiment analysis, time series, and deep learning.
• Ability to retrieve, combine, and analyze data from varied sources and structures.
• Hands-on experience developing data science solutions using open-source tools and cloud computing platforms.

Nice To Haves

• Master's degree in a STEM field plus 3 years of data analytics experience, or a PhD in a STEM field.
• At least 1 year of experience working with AWS.
• At least 3 years of experience with Python, Scala, or R.
• At least 3 years of experience with machine learning.
• At least 3 years of experience with SQL.

Responsibilities

• Evaluate emerging data vendors and products for use in credit strategies.
• Engineer high-impact features from alternative datasets.
• Build scalable data processing and monitoring systems.
• Serve as a data-domain expert and guide users on dataset applications.
• Navigate risk governance for vendor models and build challenger models using new data.
• Collaborate with data scientists, software engineers, and product managers to deliver customer-focused products.
• Use data science technologies to analyze large volumes of numeric and textual data.
• Build machine-learning models through design, training, evaluation, validation, and implementation.
• Translate complex technical work into tangible business goals.

Benefits

• Comprehensive health, financial, and other benefits supporting total well-being.
• Eligible for performance-based incentive compensation, which may include cash bonuses and/or long-term incentives.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior