Principal for AI and GenAI - AI Center of Excellence (CoE)

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Job Description:

Principal AI and GenAI – AI Center of Excellence (CoE)

We are seeking an exceptional Principal for AI and GenAI  Engineer/Researcher to join our premier ML innovation and AI CoE team at UPS. As a key member of this team, you will drive the development and shipping of cutting-edge ML technologies that improve the lives of billions of Apple customers. The successful candidate will lead the design, implementation, and testing of innovative AI and ML algorithms, methods, and systems for personalization, memory, diagnostics, representation and reasoning. This role requires a deep understanding of AI and ML fundamentals, strong leadership skills, and the ability to collaborate with cross-functional teams.

This position focuses on developing strategy and governing policies around predictive and prescriptive solutions that inform business decisions and solve business challenges. This position provides expert direction and acts as a principal consultant in the conception, creation, delivery, and enterprise-wide implementation of machine learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems. This position architect’s data and modelling pipelines using large volumes of structured and unstructured data across a diverse set of techniques from a variety of fields and industries. This position provides thought leadership, strategic thinking, and modelling experience, serving as the central point of contact and Subject Matter Expert (SME) guiding AI implementation across the organization. This position leverages knowledge of business domains and a broad set of advanced analytical skills in the design and development of methodological standards, standardized processes, demos, and proof of concept(s) for the organization’s highest priority business needs.

This position provides thought leadership, strategic thinking, and modelling experience, serving as the Subject Matter Expert (SME) guiding AI implementation across the UPS enterprise. This position supports senior leadership by actively advising on and championing the practical implementation of broad advanced analytics initiatives aimed at delivering value.

Description

This is a technical lead position, working with both junior and senior AI and ML engineers/researchers, product engineers, data scientist and data engineers in a cross functional setting. You core responsibilities will be: (Hands on) Lead or co-lead the design, implementation, and testing, of algorithms, methods, and systems for AI and ML based personalization, memory, diagnostics, and reasoning. It entails working with multi-functional engineering teams, defining dependencies with other teams, defining API’s and developing technical agreements. You will be expected to stay up to date up and monitor the latest developments in AI (incl GenAI) and ML  and explore their possible application to UPS products and services.

QUALIFICATIONS

Minimum Requirements:

• Strong ML and AI expertise and deep understanding of the ML and AI fundamentals including mathematics, architectures, representation and reasoning, generation/diffusion processes, and diagnostics
• Strong Computer Science algorithmic and theory knowledge, and strong statistical fundamentals.
• 10+ Years experience on training, evaluating, and characterizing ML models and end to end systems
• 5 Years of experience in at least one domain of application for ML: NLP, Computer Vision, reinforcement learning. A deep understanding of the applications, challenges, and opportunities in these domains.
• Ability to distill and formulate a vision and requirements from a vague desiderata description of a project outcome
• Excellent leadership and communication skills (verbal and written) with the ability to effectively advocate technical solutions to research scientists, engineering teams as well as business audiences.
• Good programming skills in python, java and c, frameworks like Pytorch, Keras,  or related high-level languages

Preferred Qualifications

• Proven leadership in shipping/designing ML and AI products.
• Experience with cross-functional projects, including de-risking and scoping.
• Demonstrable track record of dealing well with ambiguity, prioritizing needs, and delivering results in a dynamic data-driven enterprise.
• Strong understanding of end-to-end systems with knowledge on cloud architecture, networking and information security

• Hands-on experience launching enterprise advanced analytics projects in production at scale using available Cloud-AI technologies and infrastructures, implementing open-source or vendor products with or without the use of enterprise data and analytical platforms.
• Involvement in the scientific community via publications, collaborations and contributions to industry groups, academia and opensource community.
• Master’s or PhD Degree in a quantitative field of mathematics, computer science, physics, economics, engineering, statistics (operations research, quantitative social science, etc.), international equivalent, or equivalent job experience.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Provide technical leadership and mentorship to data scientists and engineers across various teams, fostering a culture of innovation and excellence in AI/GenAI, even without direct managerial authority.
• Promotes and evangelizes best practices on data governance, data stewardship, data science, and ethical AI to internal and external customers, acting as a key technology evangelist for AI/GenAI capabilities across the enterprise
• Serve as a core member of the AI Center of Excellence, driving AI adoption, setting standards, and providing expert consultation across business units.
• Communicates verbally and in writing to business customers and senior leadership team, including regular interaction with the CDTO, CTO, and other C-level executives, educating them about our systems, as well as sharing insights and recommendations.
• Provides expertise in the execution of advanced analytics solutions that addresses specific challenges across the organization.
• Works with internal and external data science teams to identify appropriate models/algorithms that solve predictive and prescriptive requirements that can be integrated to improve current processes, drive better insights, increase profits, and develop new strategies for products and services.
• Identifies and recommends new opportunities to leverage data as a strategic asset to solve business problems.
• Identifies, explores, and recommends emerging tools and technologies that will support the acceleration of the data pipelines and the end-to-end data science lifecycle to meet current and future business requirements.
• Defines and identifies roadmaps to increase opportunities and efforts that move the organization from descriptive to predictive and prescriptive analytics.
• Acts as SME on UPS business processes, data, and advanced analytics capabilities to scope problems, data required to solve problems, model, and available frameworks on predictive and prescriptive analytic solutions internally and in the industry.
• Defines strategies that supports the creation, development, and delivery of analytic solutions to meet business needs.
• Maintains broad understanding of implementation, integration, and inter-connectivity issues with emerging tools and technologies.

Employee Type:

UPS is committed to providing a workplace free of discrimination, harassment, and retaliation.

Other Criteria:

UPS is an equal opportunity employer. UPS does not discriminate on the basis of race/color/religion/sex/national origin/veteran/disability/age/sexual orientation/gender identity or any other characteristic protected by law.

Basic Qualifications:

Must be a U.S. Citizen or National of the U.S., an alien lawfully admitted for permanent residence, or an alien authorized to work in the U.S. for this employer.