Principal Data Scientist - CX

With a career at The Home Depot, you can be yourself and also be part of something bigger.

Position Purpose:

The Principal Data Scientist is responsible for leading high-impact data science and AI initiatives that drive business growth, improve operational efficiency, and create better customer and associate experiences. A key focus of this role will be advancing AI-powered customer support and agentic workflows that apply the reasoning, context, and decision-making patterns used by skilled associates to help customers resolve complex needs. These capabilities are designed to provide customers with faster, more effective self-service experiences while improving resolution quality and reducing the cost to serve.

As a Principal Data Scientist, you will lead the design and development of end-to-end AI and data science solutions, including predictive models, generative AI applications, agentic workflows, decisioning and orchestration capabilities. You will identify opportunities to apply the right combination of machine learning, large language models, optimization, business rules, enterprise data, and APIs to create intelligent solutions that can reason across customer needs, take appropriate actions, and integrate with production systems.

You will partner closely with Product, Engineering, Architecture, and business teams to translate complex customer and operational problems into scalable AI capabilities. You will help refine how AI workflows understand intent, make decisions, use enterprise tools and data, and determine the appropriate next action. You will guide solutions from experimentation and proof of concept through production deployment, while establishing rigorous approaches for evaluation, experimentation, monitoring, reliability, and continuous improvement.

The Principal Data Scientist will also provide technical leadership across data science teams, mentor other data scientists, develop reusable AI capabilities and intellectual property, and help shape the adoption of emerging AI technologies across The Home Depot. This role contributes to building strong data science talent through mentorship, recruiting, and hiring while maintaining connections with academic and industry experts to advance the application of AI and data science to complex business problems.

Key Responsibilities:

• 25% Solution Development - 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
• 20% Project Management & Team Support - 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
• 20% Business Collaboration - 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
• 35% Technical Exploration & Development - 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 (for example, codified data products, project documentation, process flowcharts) to ensure solutions are leveraged for future projects; 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 academi