Principal data scientist

Job Description

TEKsystems is partnered with a software company in Raleigh that needs to hire a Senior Data Scientist for their flagship product, a leading global provider of information and analytics. Recently the company has focused on the general availability for U.S. customers, a generative AI solution designed to transform legal work. The product delivers trusted results in a familiar, easy-to-use interface with linked hallucination-free legal citations that combine the power of generative AI with proprietary to the company's search technology, functionality, and authoritative content.

This role leads the design and development of an advanced multi‑agent AI platform that powers intelligent research, drafting, and reasoning capabilities for large‑scale enterprise knowledge environments. You will architect agent frameworks, optimize retrieval‑augmented generation pipelines, fine‑tune language models, and build the infrastructure that enables AI systems to collaborate, plan, and execute complex tasks reliably. The work directly shapes the next generation of AI‑driven professional tools used by experts in high‑stakes domains.

Core Responsibilities

• Architect and implement multi‑agent systems capable of planning, tool use, and coordinated task execution.
• Design and optimize RAG pipelines including embeddings, hybrid retrieval, reranking, and context‑window strategies.
• Fine‑tune and evaluate small, medium, and large language models for domain‑specific reasoning and summarization.
• Develop prompt engineering frameworks, guardrails, and automated evaluation suites for agent reliability.
• Build scalable ML services and APIs for production deployment in distributed environments.
• Collaborate with product, engineering, and domain experts to translate complex workflows into agentic AI solutions.
• Establish best practices for model evaluation, observability, safety, and compliance.
• Mentor DS/ML engineers and contribute to long‑term AI strategy and architecture.

Required Expertise

• 6–12+ years in Data Science / ML Engineering, with deep experience in LLM‑based systems.
• Proven experience building agentic architectures (planner‑executor, tool‑use agents, ReAct‑style reasoning).
• Strong background in RAG, embeddings, retrieval optimization, and evaluation.
• Expertise in NLP, transformers, deep learning, and model fine‑tuning.
• Proficiency with PyTorch, HuggingFace, LangChain/LlamaIndex, Ray, Kubernetes, and vector databases.
• Experience designing production‑grade ML systems with monitoring, evaluation, and observability.
• Strong communication skills and ability to lead technical direction.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in enterprise search, knowledge management, or high‑compliance domains.
• Experience with model distillation, LoRA/QLoRA, PEFT, and model compression.
• Experience building evaluation frameworks for hallucination, grounding, and agent reliability.
• Familiarity with knowledge graphs, symbolic reasoning, or hybrid neuro‑symbolic systems.
• Publications, patents, or open‑source contributions in LLMs or agent systems.
• Strong coding skills in Python 7+ years.
• Be a natural problem solver, able to take a lead in collaborating to resolve issues.
• Proficiency in IDE debugging: VSCODE and PYCHARM.
• Have communication skills.
• 5+ years of experience in AI and machine learning.
• Deep understanding of machine learning algorithms, classification models, diagnostic testing of models.
• Experience working directly and Transformer based architectures including BERT, RoBERTa, T5 etc. Nd familiarity with large language models and fine tuning.
• Experience with conversational search / semantic search, reinforcement learning, prompt engineering, hallucination mitigation.
• Working understanding of the business risks associated with applying LLM (LangChain) in a business.
• Experience working with AWS, RAG, SageMaker, SQL.

Skills

• Python
• Data science
• Machine learning
• Artificial intelligence

Additional Skills & Qualifications

NA

Experience Level

Expert Level

Job Type & Location

This is a Contract to Hire position based out of Raleigh, NC.

Pay and Benefits

The pay range for this position is $75.00 - $90.00/hr. Individual compensation offered for this position within this range will depend on many factors, including qualifications, skills, relevant experience, job knowledge, geographic location, internal equity, and other pertinent job-related factors.

Eligibility requirements apply to some benefits and may depend on your job classification and length of employment. Benefits are subject to change and may be subject to specific elections, plan, or program terms. If eligible, the benefits available for this temporary role may include the following: • Medical, dental & vision • Critical Illness, Accident, and Hospital • 401(k) Retirement Plan – Pre-tax and Roth post-tax contributions available • Life Insurance (Voluntary Life & AD&D for the employee and dependents) • Short and long-term disability • Health Spending Account (HSA) • Transportation benefits • Employee Assistance Program • Time Off/Leave (PTO, Vacation or Sick Leave)

Workplace Type

This is a fully remote position.

Application Deadline

This position is anticipated to close on Sep 29, 2026.