Lead Data Scientist

Work mode: Onsite / Hybrid (3 days in office) Type: Contract Location: Pleasanton, CA About The Role We are seeking a hands-on Gen AI Lead to architect, ship, and scale production Generative AI systems. This is a senior, technically demanding contract role for someone who has taken Gen AI applications from raw business problem to live traffic — owning model selection, evaluation, cost, latency, security, and team enablement. You will be the most senior Gen AI person in the room and expected to both build and elevate the team. What You'll Do Architect and deliver production Gen AI systems (RAG, fine-tuning, agents) end-to-end. Own evaluation frameworks, guardrails, and grounding to control hallucination and factual reliability. Drive inference cost, latency, and token economics at scale. Establish data governance, security, and compliance practices for enterprise Gen AI. Mentor engineers and calibrate stakeholder expectations on what the technology can and cannot do. What We're Looking For Proven track record architecting and shipping production Gen AI systems end-to-end. Deep experience with evaluation, guardrails, and hallucination control in real deployments. Strong command of inference cost and latency optimization at scale. Hands-on expertise in data governance, security, and compliance for enterprise Gen AI. Senior technical leadership and stakeholder communication skills. Qualified applicants will be asked to complete a short set of screening questions as part of the application. #J-18808-Ljbffr