Senior Data Scientist

Overview:

Job Title: Senior Data Scientist - Knowledge Domain: Product (Job ID: 2099)

Location: Work From Home - USA, Denver, Colorado 80237 - look for locals

Duration: July 15, 2025 - February 27, 2026

Company: Western Union

Hire Type: Contractor (Contract Only)

Standard Hours per Week: 40

JOB DESCRIPTION

Senior Data Scientist - Knowledge Domain: Product

We are seeking a technically advanced and product-oriented Senior Data Scientist to lead the development of machine learning and deep learning solutions that power intelligent decision-making and innovative products. This role is ideal for someone with extensive experience in building, evaluating, and deploying ML and neural network models in production environments. You'll collaborate cross-functionally to create and scale real-world AI applications that have direct impact on users and business performance.

Role Responsibilities:

Design, build, and evaluate machine learning and deep learning models for classification, regression, recommendation, NLP, computer vision, and time-series forecasting.

Apply deep learning techniques (e.g., CNNs, RNNs, LSTMs, Transformers) to solve complex, data-intensive problems.

Lead the development of ML products, from model prototyping through production deployment, performance monitoring, and continuous improvement.

Select appropriate architectures and hyperparameters, optimize model performance, and use proper evaluation metrics (e.g., AUC, F1, BLEU, IoU, perplexity) based on the use case.

Collaborate with product managers and engineers to translate business challenges into deployable solutions using AI/ML.

Design automated pipelines for data preprocessing, feature engineering, training, and inference (batch or real-time).

Evaluate model drift, monitor performance post-deployment, and implement retraining pipelines as part of a production MLOps system.

Mentor junior data scientists, contribute to code reviews, and lead technical discussions across the data science and engineering teams.

Role Requirements:

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Statistics, Applied Math, or related field (Master's or PhD strongly preferred).

5+ years of industry experience in applied machine learning, with 2+ years focused on deep learning and neural network applications.

Experience in Banking, Payments or Financial Services formulating AI data solutions that allow us to leverage our data to know our customers better and target our resources for better market penetration and focused attention and education.

Proficiency in Python and ML libraries such as scikit-learn, XGBoost, TensorFlow, Keras, or PyTorch.

Deep understanding of neural networks, model regularization, overfitting/underfitting prevention, and GPU-accelerated training.

Experience with customer data enrichments.

Proven track record of building, evaluating, and deploying machine learning models at scale in production environments.

Experience with cloud platforms (AWS/GCP/Azure), containerization, and model serving technologies.

Excellent communication skills, with the ability to present complex findings to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Hands-on experience with real-world applications of deep learning, such as recommendation engines, fraud detection, customer segmentation, document summarization, image recognition, or speech processing.

Familiarity with MLOps tools (e.g., MLflow, SageMaker, Airflow, Kubeflow).

Experience with CI/CD for ML, feature stores, and real-time inference systems.

Contributions to academic research, open-source ML projects, or ML/AI patents.

Skills:

Knowledge Domain