Principal Data Scientist - Gen AI & Agentic AI

At Niagara, we're looking for Team Members who want to be part of achieving our mission to provide our customers the highest quality most affordable bottled water.

Consider applying here, if you want to:

• Work in an entrepreneurial and dynamic environment with a chance to make an impact.
• Develop lasting relationships with great people.
• Have the opportunity to build a satisfying career.

We offer competitive compensation and benefits packages for our Team Members.

Essential Functions

• Lead the strategy, design, and delivery of enterprisegrade GenAI and agentic AI solutions, driving the development of nextgeneration agents, LLMpowered applications, and hybrid GenAI/ML systems that improve decisionmaking, automation, and operational efficiency across Niagara's business units.
• Partner with senior business leaders, product management, and crossfunctional technology teams to translate ambiguous or complex business challenges into clear problem statements, measurable outcomes, and prioritized AI initiatives.
• Architect robust agentic systems, including multistep orchestration, tooluse agents, retrievalaugmented workflows, grounding layers, and guardrail frameworks that ensure reliability, safety, and domain accuracy.
• Design and implement scalable analytic and modeling approaches, including feature engineering, embedding strategies, retrieval pipelines, finetuning, prompt engineering, supervised learning, and hybrid architectures combining classical ML with GenAI capabilities.
• Develop, prototype, and operationalize LLMdriven solutions using enterprise platforms such as Azure OpenAI, Databricks, Snowflake Cortex, Oracle AI Agent Studio, and containerized microservices.
• Build reusable, interpretable, and productionready models, agents, and pipelines, ensuring they meet standards for scalability, observability, resilience, and maintainability.
• Establish and own Niagara's LLMOps and agent lifecycle practices, including CI/CD for models and agents, monitoring, evaluation frameworks, prompt testing, drift detection, and continuous improvement workflows.
• Champion Responsible AI principles, embedding safety, fairness, explainability, privacy, security, grounding, and governance throughout the agent and model development lifecycle.
• Define technical standards and best practices for GenAI development, including vector database usage, evaluation frameworks, embeddings, data preparation workflows, and content grounding strategies.
• Collaborate with IT, data engineering, and platform teams to ensure required infrastructure-data access, compute environments, vector stores, APIs, and application integration layers-is in place for scalable deployment.
• Influence executive stakeholders by crafting compelling narratives, visualizations, and recommendations that communicate complex AI concepts in businessrelevant terms and drive strategic alignment.
• Coach, mentor, and uplift the technical capabilities of data scientists and senior individual contributors, providing thought leadership, code reviews, architectural guidance, and development plans.
• Drive innovation initiatives and proofsofconcept, evaluating emerging GenAI frameworks, agent orchestration tools, evaluation stacks, retrieval technologies, and model families.
• Contribute to enterprise AI governance, including model/agent documentation, risk assessments, access control, versioning, testing standards, and audit readiness.
• Foster crossfunctional collaboration, identifying opportunities to leverage GenAI across manufacturing, supply chain, commercial operations, HR, legal, and corporate functions.
• Represent DDI as a subjectmatter expert for GenAI and agentic AI, sharing insights, educating stakeholders, and building organizational readiness for advanced AI capabilities.
• Analytics Product Expertise Strong knowledge of agile analytics product delivery, full-stack development (Data Engineering, Data Science, UX/UI), and industry best practices.
• Product & Project Management Skilled in developing Product Briefs, managing roadmaps, backlog prioritization, release planning, sprint metrics, and cross-team coordination while ensuring business value-driven outcomes.
• Business & Process Understanding deep comprehension of business processes, functional digital capabilities (Supply Chain, Manufacturing, Finance, Sales & Marketing), and high-quality analytics delivery.
• Change & People Management skilled in managing change initiatives, fostering collaboration, and balancing competing priorities in a fast-paced environment.

Qualifications

• Minimum Qualifications:
  • 10+ years of experience in Data Science or Analytics, including 4+ years leading projects or technical teams.
  • Deep expertise in Machine Learning, Generative AI, Large Language Models (LLMs), RetrievalAugmented Generation (RAG), and agentic AI systems.
  • Demonstrated experience designing and delivering production AI systems using Azure and Databricks.
  • Strong storytelling, executive communication, and influence skills, with an ability to translate complex AI concepts into business outcomes.
    *experience may include a combination of work experience and education
• Preferred Qualifications:
  • 12-15+ years of experience in Data Science, AI/ML engineering, or advanced analytics, including leading platformlevel or enterprise GenAI programs.
  • Experience working with agent orchestration frameworks, vector databases, evaluation stacks, and modern LLMOps tooling.
  • Experience with Oracle AI Agent Studio.
    *experience may include a combination of work experience and education

Competencies

• Strategy & Technical Leadership - Ability to define enterprise AI strategy, set technical direction for GenAI and agentic AI programs, and guide longterm architectural decisions.
• Architecture & Delivery Excellence - Expertise in designing endtoend agentic systems, retrieval pipelines, and LLMpowered applications with strong standards for scalability, reliability, and security.
• LLMOps & Governance - Deep understanding of model/agent lifecycle management, evaluation frameworks, monitoring, guardrails, Responsible AI principles, and enterprise governance processes.
• Stakeholder Influence - Strong capability to communicate complex AI concepts to executive audiences, drive alignment across product and business teams, and influence crossfunctional decisions.
• People Leadership - Demonstrated ability to coach and develop data scientists and senior ICs, elevate technical maturity, and foster a culture of innovation and high performance.
• Advanced GenAI & Agentic System Design - Expertise in LLMs, RAG, embeddings, vector databases, agent frameworks, and multistep orchestration patterns.
• AI Solution Delivery & Integration - Experience integrating models and agents into applications, microservices, or enterprise platforms (Azure, Databricks, Snowflake, Oracle AI Agent Studio).
• Analytical & Systems Thinking - Strong ability to break down ambiguous problems, synthesize complex information, and design solutions that balance technical depth with business impact.
• CrossFunctional Collaboration - Proven ability to work effectively with product, engineering, IT, operations, and business stakeholders to unlock enterprisewide value.
• Executive Communication & Storytelling - Skilled at creating compelling narratives, visualizations, and recommendations that drive strategic decisions.

This position embodies the values of Niagara's LIFE competency model, focusing on the following key drivers of success:

• Lead Like an Owner
  • Provides strategic input and oversight to departmental projects
  • Skilled in reducing costs and managing timelines while prioritizing long run impact
  • Leads/facilitates discussions to get positive outcomes for the customer
  • Makes strategic and sustainable data driven decisions which prioritize the needs of the customer over departmental/individual goals
• InnovACT
  • Continuously evaluates existing programs and processes, and develops new initiatives to increase efficiency and reduce waste
  • Creates, monitors, and responds to departmental performance metrics to drive continuous improvement
  • Communicates a clear vision, organizes resources effectively, and adjusts the strategy as needed when managing change
• Find a Way
  • Demonstrates ability to think analytically and synthesize complex information
  • Effectively delegates technical tasks to subordinates
  • Works effectively with depts, vendors, and customers to achieve organizational success
  • Identifies opportunities for collaboration in strategic ways
• Empowered to be Great
  • Engages in long term talent planning
  • Provides opportunities for the development of all direct reports
  • Understands, identifies, and addresses conflict within own team and between teams

Education

• Minimum Required:
  • Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science/Data Science/Statistics or other related field

• Preferred:
  • Master's Degree in Computer Science/Data Science/Statistics or other related field

Certification/License:

• Required: N/A
• Preferred: Agentic AI / Gen AI / Machine Learning or Advanced Analytics certifications.

Typical Compensation Range

Benefits

Our Total Rewards package is thoughtfully designed to support both you and your family:

Regular full-time team members are offered a comprehensive benefits package, while part-time, intern, and seasonal team members are offered a limited benefits package.

• Paid Time Off for holidays, sick time, and vacation time
• Paid parental and caregiver leaves
• Medical, including virtual care options
• Dental
• Vision
• 401(k) with company match
• Health Savings Account with company match
• Flexible Spending Accounts
• Expanded mental wellbeing benefits including free counseling sessions for all team members and household family members
• Family Building Benefits including enhanced fertilitybenefits for IVF and fertility preservation plus adoption, surrogacy, and Doula reimbursements
• Income protection including Life and AD&D, short and long-term disability, critical illness and an accident plan
• Special discount programs including pet plans, pre-paid legal services, identity theft, car rental, airport parking, etc.
• Tuition reimbursement, college savings plan and scholarship opportunities
• And more!

https://careers.niagarawater.com/us/en/benefits

* *Los Angeles County applicants only** Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, the California Fair Chance Act, and any other applicable local and state laws.

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