Data Scientist (AI)

Job Description

Location: Phoenix, AZ

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Schedule: 4 days per week onsite

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Employment Type: Full-time

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A leading environmental services company is hiring an AI-focused Data Scientist to join its growing AI and data science team. This team develops customer-facing and internal AI solutions that improve decision-making, customer experiences, and business processes across the organization.

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This is not a traditional Data Scientist role. The ideal candidate will have strong data science fundamentals combined with hands-on AI engineering experience. They need someone who has built and deployed production GenAI applications.

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The role will focus primarily on building new AI products and proofs of concept while also improving and maintaining existing production solutions. You will work closely with data scientists, analytics engineers, full-stack engineers, and business stakeholders to develop AI capabilities that are scalable, reliable, and useful to the business.

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What You’ll Be Doing

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• Build and deploy production-ready GenAI and LLM applications
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• Develop new AI products, capabilities, and proofs of concept
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• Improve existing customer-facing and internal AI solutions based on user feedback
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• Perform prompt engineering, testing, optimization, and debugging
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• Evaluate AI performance, accuracy, business impact, and overall solution quality
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• Identify and resolve issues involving hallucinations, embeddings, vector search, semantic retrieval, bias, drift, data quality, and model assumptions
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• Develop well-structured, maintainable solutions using Python and SQL
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• Push prompt updates and backend changes into production
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• Raise pull requests, participate in code reviews, and work directly with production code
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• Partner with full-stack engineering and IT teams to integrate AI capabilities into downstream systems
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• Conduct experimentation, hypothesis testing, and measurement to determine whether AI solutions are delivering value
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• Translate business requirements into practical AI solutions
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• Clearly communicate findings and recommendations to technical and non-technical stakeholders
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• Document solution design, assumptions, data definitions, limitations, and performance
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• Support future agentic AI initiatives and other emerging AI use cases
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Required Qualifications

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• 3 or more years of professional experience in data science, machine learning, AI engineering, or a related field
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• Hands-on experience building and deploying GenAI or LLM applications in a production environment
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• Strong prompt engineering experience, including prompt testing, optimization, and debugging
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• Advanced Python skills
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• Strong working knowledge of SQL and relational data concepts
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• Experience deploying AI or machine learning solutions in a cloud environment
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• Strong understanding of data science fundamentals, including statistical analysis, model evaluation, experimentation, and performance measurement
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• Experience working with Git, CI/CD pipelines, pull requests, and code-review processes
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• Ability to write readable, well-organized, and maintainable production code
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• Experience collaborating with software engineers or full-stack engineering teams
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• Ability to work directly with business stakeholders and translate business problems into technical solutions
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• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Statistics, Mathematics, Engineering, Information Management, or another analytical field
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Preferred Qualifications

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• AWS experience, particularly with services used to build and deploy AI applications
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• Experience with RAG, embeddings, vector databases, semantic search, or retrieval-based AI applications
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• Snowflake experience
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• Experience with Node.js or backend application development
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• MLOps or model-monitoring experience
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• Agentic AI experience
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• Experience building customer-facing AI products
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• Familiarity with AI-assisted development tools such as GitHub Copilot, Cursor, or Claude Code
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• Master’s degree in an analytical or technical field
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This is a great opportunity for someone who has a solid data science foundation but enjoys working closer to AI product development and engineering. The position requires working onsite in Phoenix four days per week.

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