Data Scientist, Specialist

Role Summary 

As a Data Scientist, Specialist, you will pair deep technical expertise with strong business partnership to turn data into decisions that drive measurable outcomes. You don’t just build models: you will be working closely with stakeholders across product, operations, and leadership to translate ambiguous business needs into structured analytic approaches. 

You will own meaningful pieces of the modeling stack end to end: from problem framing and data wrangling through model development, evaluation, deployment, and the design of how a human ultimately consumes and acts on the output. Success in this role requires not only technical excellence, but also the ability to influence decisions, align stakeholders, and communicate insights clearly enough to drive action. 

You will serve as an analytics expert on cross-functional teams supporting large strategic initiatives, bringing rigor, clarity, and perspective to both technical and business discussions. This is a forward-looking role: we are hiring people who can do excellent classical data science and operate as trusted partners in shaping how AI drives business value at Vanguard. 
 
What You'll Do 

Lead communication and influence decisions. Translate complex findings into clear, actionable narratives tailored to different audiences; align stakeholders on trade-offs, risks, and recommended actions, and ensure insights result in real business decisions. 

Build and validate models end to end. Develop predictive and prescriptive models on large-scale data: from feature engineering and data foraging through model selection, calibration, and validation. 

Make insights actionable, not just accurate. Design how model output is surfaced to the people who use it: the explanation, the context, and the recommended action. Optimize for a human making a good decision, not just for a leaderboard metric. 

Ship to production and keep it healthy. Partner with MLE and engineering to deploy models, then own monitoring for drift, degradation, data quality, and real-world performance against business outcomes. 

Probe the business, then structure the problem. Engage stakeholders to understand processes and drivers, bring structure to ambiguous requests, and translate them into a defensible analytic approach. 

Design and run experiments. Apply sound experimental and causal reasoning to measure impact and to distinguish what predicts an outcome from what changes it. 

Communicate with clarity. Prepare and deliver insight presentations and recommendations; translate complex findings and their implications for business partners and leadership. 

Build with AI as a force multiplier. Use modern AI tooling (coding assistants, LLM-based workflows) to accelerate your own development, prototyping, and analysis — with sound judgment about where these tools help and where they don't. 

Help grow the practice. Serve as an analytics expert on cross-functional strategic initiatives, contribute to research and reusable methods, and help raise the bar for the broader Vanguard analytics community. 

Core Qualifications 

• 5+ years of applied data science / ML experience, including work that reached production or directly drove busines