About the position
The Principal Data Scientist is responsible for leading data science initiatives that drive business profitability, increased efficiencies and improved customer experience. This role assists in the development of the Home Depot advanced analytics infrastructure that informs decision making by leveraging mastery of both the business and Advanced Analytics Modeling techniques. Principal Data Scientists focus on seeking out business opportunities to leverage data science as a competitive advantage. As the Principal Data Scientist for Contact Center Transformation, you will lead the development and implementation of advanced AI and Machine Learning (ML) solutions, focusing on large language models (LLMs) and generative AI to enhance self-service experiences in our contact centers. In this role, you will explore innovative techniques, such as LLM chaining and agent-based models, while collaborating closely with engineering architects to ensure that data science innovations align with our overall technology vision. You will be responsible for creating multi-intent, context-aware AI systems that enable seamless, interactive customer conversations. By applying best practices in natural language processing (NLP), dialogue management, and AI-to-human handoffs, you will ensure smooth, real-time transitions, ultimately enhancing the customer experience. Working alongside engineering architects and cross-functional teams, you will align AI innovations with the company's broader technology strategy. Additionally, you will optimize large-scale model deployments using techniques like quantization, distillation, and pruning, ensuring that models meet stringent latency and throughput requirements for real-time interactions. Your expertise in NLP, dialogue management, and AI-to-human handoffs will be crucial in creating a seamless transition between AI-driven and human-assisted services. Beyond technical execution, you will be a thought leader, staying at the forefront of AI research, identifying emerging trends, and translating complex concepts into strategic business opportunities.
Responsibilities
- Utilize advanced expertise when designing and developing algorithms and models to use against large datasets to create business insights.
- Make appropriate selection, utilization and interpretation of advanced analytics methodologies.
- Effectively communicate insights and recommendations to both technical and non-technical leaders and business customers/partners.
- Clearly communicate impacts of recommendations to drive alignment and appropriate implementation.
- Test alternative methodology and cutting-edge algorithms on business problems to deliver even better solutions and recommendations.
- Work with project teams and business partners to determine project goals.
- Provide direction on prioritization of work and ensure quality of work.
- Provide mentoring and coaching to more junior roles to support their technical competencies.
- Collaborate with managers and team in the distribution of workload and resources.
- Support recruiting and hiring efforts for the team.
- Serve as a technical subject matter expert (SME) for one or more data science methods, both predictive and prescriptive.
- Leverage extensive business knowledge into solution approach.
- Effectively develop trust and collaboration with internal customers and cross-functional teams.
- Provide general education on advanced analytics to technical and non-technical business partners.
- Deep understanding of IT needs for the team to be successful in tackling business problems.
- Actively seek out new business opportunities to leverage data science as a competitive advantage.
- Seek further knowledge on key developments within data science, technical skill sets, and additional data sources.
- Participate in the continuous improvement of data science and analytics by developing replicable solutions.
- Define best practices and develop clear vision for data analysis and model productionalization.
- Support development of cutting-edge, innovative algorithms that would serve as Intellectual Property for Home Depot.
- Demonstrate and share technical expertise by attending conferences, speaking events and publishing papers.
- Be a thought leader within Home Depot in one or more Prescriptive Modeling techniques like optimization, computer vision, recommendation, search or NLP.
- Network with both academic and industry experts to further the application of data science to business problems.
Requirements
- Must be eighteen years of age or older.
- Must be legally permitted to work in the United States.
- PhD in a quantitative field (Computer Science, Math, Statistics, etc.) or equivalent work experience.
- 10+ years of experience in business intelligence and analytics.
- Expertise in a modern scripting language (preferably Python).
- Expertise running queries against data (preferably with Google BigQuery or SQL).
- Advanced knowledge of Microsoft Office Suite.
- Expertise with data visualization software (preferably Tableau).
- Expertise in Prescriptive Modeling like optimization, computer vision, recommendation, search or NLP.
- Demonstrated mastery in predictive modeling, data mining and data analysis.
- Demonstrated mastery utilizing statistical techniques to identify key insights that help solve business problems.
