Data Scientist II

Job Title: Data Scientist II, Generative AI

Location/Type: Onsite, Phoenix, AZ - Must currently permanently reside in AZ. This position cannot offer relocation at this time

Start Date: ASAP

Duration: Perm

Compensation Range: $140k-$150k/yr

Benefits: Eligible for Health, Dental, Vision, 401K, PTO

Must be authorized to work in the U.S. This position is not eligible for sponsorship .

Job Description:
This role owns generative AI and data science initiatives end to end within the environmental services space, from rapid prototyping through production deployment. The right person can move fluidly between experimenting with new AI ideas, building out an engineering focused waste classification project, and maintaining a live RAG system with multiple production APIs.

Day to Day Responsibilities:

• Design, build, and deploy generative AI, RAG, and machine learning solutions that directly impact business outcomes
• Rapidly prototype new AI use cases, including writing Python scripts that stand up vector databases and integrate LLMs
• Take LLM applications from concept through production deployment
• Perform ongoing model changes, prompt updates, and end to end pipeline checks
• Build and maintain an engineering project that codes and classifies waste profiles using customer and waste data
• Manage and maintain a RAG system supporting five production APIs
• Partner with a full stack development team on production deployments
• Monitor solution performance in production, resolving issues such as model drift, hallucination, and retrieval quality
• Translate ambiguous business problems into scoped, production ready analytical approaches
• Communicate insights, tradeoffs, and recommendations to both technical and non technical stakeholders
• Document solution design, assumptions, and limitations to support reuse and transparency
• Mentor other data scientists and technical team members on modeling and architecture approaches

Minimum Requirements :

• 3 plus years of experience in a generative AI or applied AI focused role, not traditional data science
• Strong hands on RAG experience, including rapid prototyping, vector database setup, and LLM integration
• Ability to clearly explain vector embeddings and cosine similarity
• Experience building LLM applications from concept to production
• AWS experience, specifically deploying applications to EC2 or building CI/CD pipelines
• Advanced Python and SQL skills, including a strong understanding of window functions
• Bachelors degree in an analytical field such as Computer Science, Mathematics, Statistics, or Engineering

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with prompt engineering and specific challenges faced applying it
• Familiarity with API testing, git version control, and GitHub Actions
• Experience monitoring AI application performance in production
• Familiarity with AI based coding assistants such as GitHub CoPilot, Cursor, or Claude Code
• Working knowledge of ML Ops tools and experiment tracking frameworks
• Masters degree