Data Scientist II

A pioneer in the caregiving space, Careforth supports family caregivers across the United States to confidently care for their loved ones at home. Through a combination of in-person home visits, remote coaching and our proprietary digital collaboration app, we provide caregivers with support, guidance, confidence, and connection to resources they need. The Caregivers and families we support stay with Careforth for many years, building lasting relationships along the way. Join us today and live our values: lead with heart, cultivate trust, go beyond.

The Data Scientist II will be an integral contributor within Careforth’s AI/ML organization, building and deploying the models and pipelines that power our risk intelligence, NLP, and AI enablement products. Working closely with Senior Data Scientists and across the data team, you will translate research into production-ready solutions spanning clinical and caregiver risk stratification, NLP signal extraction, LLM-powered chatbots and assistants, and data-driven insights reporting.

The ideal candidate brings solid applied ML experience, a strong grasp of both classical modeling and modern NLP and LLM techniques, and the engineering discipline to build reliable, explainable, and HIPAA-compliant systems in a regulated, mission-critical environment.

• Build and deploy supervised classification models (XGBoost, LightGBM, regularized regression) for clinical risk stratification and caregiver engagement scoring, including feature engineering, class imbalance handling, model calibration, and threshold optimization.
• Develop NLP pipelines for clinical text extraction from nurse notes and operational data — including named entity recognition, negation detection, relation extraction, and document classification using spaCy, scispaCy, and MedSpaCy.
• Implement and maintain LLM-powered tools including RAG architectures, prompt engineering, embedding models and vector search, hallucination detection, and response evaluation and guardrails for clinical and caregiver-facing use cases.
• Support speech and audio ML pipelines — ASR fine-tuning, speaker diarization, sentiment and emotion detection, and keyword detection — for real-time and ambient listening applications.
• Contribute to composite risk scoring and ensemble model fusion, including SHAP-based explainability, model calibration, and uncertainty quantification supporting care team and payer-facing outputs.
• Apply model explainability (SHAP, LIME), monitor for data drift and bias, and uphold HIPAA-compliant data handling standards throughout the ML lifecycle.
• Maintain MLOps standards: implement automated testing, CI/CD for ML, model versioning via MLflow, and participate in experiment tracking and model registry governance in Databricks.
• Collaborate with Data Engineering on feature store integration, scoring pipeline design, and structured output schemas; participate in technical design reviews and provide peer feedback.
• Perform other duties and special projects as assigned.

Education

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Computational Linguistics, Statistics, or a related quantitative field.

Experience
• 4–6 years of applied ML experience, with at least 2 years in production NLP or LLM development.
• Demonstrated ability to take models from experimentation through deployment and ongoing monitoring.
• Experience in healthcare, managed care, or regulated data environments preferred; familiarity with HIPAA data handling required.

Technical Skills
• Strong Python: pandas, NumPy, scikit-learn; deep learning frameworks (PyTorch and/or TensorFlow).
• Proficiency in gradient boosting methods (XGBoost, LightGBM), classification modeling, and model evaluation including cross-validation, precision-recall optimization, and SHAP-based explainability.
• Hands-on NLP experience with spaCy, scispaCy, MedSpaCy, Hugging Face Transformers (BERT, GPT), and LangChain; experience with LLM fine-tuning, RAG, and vector databases.
• Familiarity with speech ML tools: ASR models (Whisper, Azure Speech), speaker diarization, and sentiment and emotion detection.
• Experience with Databricks (Delta Lake, MLflow, Spark) and AWS (S3, SageMaker, Bedrock); working knowledge of Docker and CI/CD for ML pipelines.
• Solid SQL skills; ability to work across data lakehouse and relational environments.

Soft Skills
• Clear and precise communicator; able to document and explain model behavior to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Collaborative team contributor; receptive to feedback, proactive in design discussions, and committed to shared engineering standards.
• Intellectually curious and self-directed; actively keeps pace with developments in applied ML and clinical AI.

At Careforth your well-being matters. With flexible schedules, a remote-first culture, and a nationally recognized wellness program, our benefits are designed to help you thrive, both professionally and personally. Discover how we invest in you:

The pay range for this position is $111,000 - $174,000. The actual wage offered may be lower or higher depending on budget and candidate experience, knowledge, skills, qualifications, and geographic location.

Founded in Boston, Careforth's caregiver programs and services improve health outcomes, keeping care at home longer. Additionally, our programs provide financial benefit to caregivers and cost savings to state agencies and health plans. At Careforth, we understand the challenges of caregiving and are committed to supporting family caregivers at every turn.

Caregivers play a critical role in the future of healthcare—and so can you.

Apply now!

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Careforth is an Equal Opportunity Employer*

DISCLAIMER: Please note this job description is not designed to cover or contain a comprehensive listing of activities, duties or responsibilities that are required of the employee for this job.

*Careforth supports families with diverse backgrounds and as an equal opportunity employer, we seek employees who reflect the diverse population we serve. Careforth complies with all applicable laws concerning hiring and employment practices and is firmly committed to fostering and maintaining a workplace free from discrimination. We pledge to hire, train, and promote our employees without regard to race, religion, gender, gender identity, genetic information, age, national origin, sexual orientation, disability, veteran status, or any other category protected by applicable law.

Careforth strives to create experiences that are accessible and welcoming to everyone, including making the careers site accessible to any and all users. If you would like to contact us regarding the company’s diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, inquire about a specific accessibility need or the accessibility of our website, or if you need assistance completing an application process, please contact People & Culture at View phone number on click.appcast.io.