Data Science Lead

Responsibilities

Collaborate with business stakeholders to identify high-value use cases that improve operational efficiency, customer experience, reliability, safety, and sustainability across electric and gas operations. Translate use cases into technical roadmaps, quantifiable KPIs, and delivery plans. Design, develop, and deploy machine learning models (predictive, optimization, time-series, NLP). Perform exploratory data analysis, feature engineering, and model validation. Lead AI solution engineering using Azure OpenAI Service (LLMs), retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with Azure Cognitive Search/Vector stores, prompt design, grounding with authoritative utility data, and guardrail policies. Build production-grade AI microservices/APIs, orchestration, and monitoring on Azure, including hallucination mitigation, content filtering, and responsible AI checks. Establish end-to-end MLOps/LLMOps pipelines, automated testing, blue/green rollouts, drift detection, model performance/SLA dashboards, and rollback procedures. Build and maintain scalable, secure data pipelines to ingest, transform, and curate data from different systems. Partner with data engineers and architects to uphold data quality, lineage, governance (Unity Catalog), and security across the Azure ecosystem. Communicate findings and operational insights via Power BI dashboards and narrative data products, enabling decision-makers in operations, planning, supply chain, and customer service. Contribute to best practices, reusable accelerators (feature stores, pipeline templates, model cards), code standards, and knowledge sharing within the Data & Analytics community of practice. Mentor and coach data scientists and engineers; conduct design reviews and provide technical oversight for complex initiatives. Ensure solutions align with utility regulatory, cybersecurity, and privacy requirements, and with corporate Responsible AI and model risk management policies. Partner with Security/Legal to complete risk assessments and approvals; incorporate auditability, explainability, and human-in-the-loop controls.

Qualifications

Master's degree or foreign equivalent in Data Science, Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Mathematics or related field.

3 years of experience with the following:

• Data science
• Data Modeling and Machine Learning modeling, or analytics
• Azure Machine Learning
• Azure Data Factory
• Azure Databricks
• Azure DevOps
• Azure AI Foundry
• Power BI
• Programming with Python and PySpark
• SQL
• Working with large-scale datasets time series and Advanced Metering Data
• Git
• Agile
• Working in the gas and/or electric utility industry; operational systems and data domains including AMI/MDM, OMS/SCADA/EMS, asset management, and market operations.
• 2 years of experience working with Large Language Models to develop Retrieval Augmentation Generation Systems.

About Us

MidAmerican Energy Company, a Midwest utility, provides regulated electric and natural gas service to more than 1.6 million customers in Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska and South Dakota. The company owns and operates a portfolio of power-generating assets, approximately 61% of which is wind generation.

About the Team

MidAmerican Energy Company is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion or religious creed, age, national origin, ancestry, citizenship status (except as required by law), gender (including gender identity and expression), sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, genetic information, physical or mental disability, veteran or military status, familial or parental status, marital status or any other category protected by applicable local, state or U.S. federal law. Employees must be able to perform the essential functions of the position, with or without an accommodation.

Job Info

• Job Identification 10005314
• Job Category Information Technology
• Locations 1615 Locust St, Des Moines, IA, 50309, US
• Pay Range $121,181 - $146,700
• Business MidAmerican Energy Company