Corporate Vice President - Lead Data Scientist

 

Location Designation: Hybrid - 3 days per week 

 

 

As a senior leader within the Artificial Intelligence & Data (AI&D) organization, you will play a pivotal role in shaping New York Life’s digital future. AI is a core growth enabler—not a side initiative—and has strong support from senior leadership.
In this role, you will lead AI strategy and delivery for Service operations (contact centers, claims management, field service). You will champion the use of Generative AI, agent-based systems, and traditional machine learning to transform customer and employee experiences, enhance efficiency, and create measurable business value.

You will work directly with the COO, operational leaders, and technology partners to set direction, drive adoption, and ensure that AI solutions are safe, scalable, and impactful. You will also mentor and grow a team of data scientists and engineers, fostering a culture of innovation and collaboration.

What You’ll Do:
Strategic Leadership
• Execute the AI strategy for Service operations in partnership with digital and technology leads.
• Champion the integration of AI into business decision-making, with initiatives tied to measurable value.
• Provide thought leadership on AI adoption, governance, and long-term capability building.

Technical & Delivery Leadership
• Lead large-scale AI initiatives end-to-end: from discovery and design through deployment, monitoring, and continuous improvement.
• Design agentic systems that automate routine service tasks, with human-in-the-loop safeguards, escalation thresholds, and safety guardrails.
• Guide and contribute to the development and operationalization of models on AWS (e.g., SageMaker, Bedrock) and modern data platforms (Snowflake, Databricks), ensuring solutions are production-ready, secure, and scalable.
• Guide teams in applying advanced ML and GenAI methods—LLMs, RAG pipelines, supervised/unsupervised models—while ensuring reliability, security, and governance.

Collaboration & Scaling
• Partner with product managers, ML and data engineers, and MLOps to deliver production-ready solutions.
• Ensure AI capabilities are accessible through APIs, dashboards, and lightweight applications for internal use.
• Mentor and grow data scientists and AI engineers, accelerating AI maturity across the enterprise.

What You’ll Bring:
• Advanced degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics, or related quantitative field.
• 8+ years of experience leading AI/ML/data science initiatives that delivered production-grade solutions with measurable business impact.
• Proven ability to bridge technical depth and executive influence: you can translate complex concepts into clear business terms and drive alignment with senior stakeholders.
• Hands-on fluency in Python, SQL, AWS (SageMaker, Bedrock, S3), Git/GitHub, and modern CI/CD workflows.
• Working knowledge of LLMs, RAG architectures (vector stores, embeddings, retrieval optimization), agent frameworks, and safe automation design.
• Strong background in machine learning methods (supervised/unsupervised, deep learning, boosting, clustering, regularization, validation).
• Experience collaborating across product, data, and engineering teams to deliver scalable, production-ready AI solutions.
• Exceptional communication, leadership, and mentoring skills; ability to inspire and scale high-performing teams.
• Experience in customer service or consumer finance domains is a plus.

 

This role involves limited travel (<10%) to events and vendor meetings.

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Pay Transparency

Salary Range: $122,500-$210,000 

Overtime eligible: Exempt 

Discretionary bonus eligible: Yes 

Sales bonus eligible: No 

Actual base salary will be determined based on several factors but not limited to individual’s experience, skills, qualifications, and job location. Additionally, employees are eligible for an annual discretionary bonus. In addition to base salary, employees may also be eligible to participate in an incentive program.

 

Company Overview