Principal Data Scientist – Gen AI & Agentic AI

Niagara Bottling • Diamond Bar, CA

6d

About The Position

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. Principal Data Scientist – Gen AI & Agentic AI 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.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience in Data Science or Analytics, including 4+ years leading projects or technical teams.
• Deep expertise in Machine Learning, Generative AI, Large Language Models (LLMs), Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG), and agentic AI systems.
• Demonstrated experience designing and delivering production AI systems using Azure and Databricks.
• Strong storytelling, executive communication, and influence skills, with an ability to translate complex AI concepts into business outcomes.
• experience may include a combination of work experience and education

Nice To Haves

• 12–15+ years of experience in Data Science, AI/ML engineering, or advanced analytics, including leading platform‑level or enterprise GenAI programs.
• Experience working with agent orchestration frameworks, vector databases, evaluation stacks, and modern LLMOps tooling.
• Experience with Oracle AI Agent Studio.
• experience may include a combination of work experience and education

Responsibilities

• 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 multi‑step 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—is 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, sharing insights, educating stakeholders, and building organizational readiness for advanced AI capabilities.

Benefits

• Our Total Rewards package is thoughtfully designed to support both you and your family:
• Regular full-time team members are offered a comprehensive benefits package, while part-time, intern, and seasonal team members are offered a limited benefits package.
• Paid Time Off for holidays, sick time, and vacation time
• Paid parental and caregiver leaves
• Medical, including virtual care options
• Dental
• Vision
• 401(k) with company match
• Health Savings Account with company match
• Flexible Spending Accounts
• Expanded mental wellbeing benefits including free counseling sessions for all team members and household family members
• Family Building Benefits including enhanced fertility benefits for IVF and fertility preservation plus adoption, surrogacy, and Doula reimbursements
• Income protection including Life and AD&D, short and long-term disability, critical illness and an accident plan
• Special discount programs including pet plans, pre-paid legal services, identity theft, car rental, airport parking, etc.
• Tuition reimbursement, college savings plan and scholarship opportunities
• And more!
• https://careers.niagarawater.com/us/en/benefits

What This Job Offers

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