Lead Data Scientist - NLP & Gen AI

Location: Guildford/Hybrid

Salary: Dependent on experience + Car allowance + Annual bonus + Benefits

Who We Are

Allianz is a global insurance company operating in 70 countries. From day one, you'll feel the value of your contributions as we offer world-class learning and career development opportunities within an inclusive culture.

The Role

As a Lead Data Scientist (NLP & GenAI) at Allianz Commercial, you will collaborate with data scientists, data engineers, ML engineers, and analysts to design and implement solutions that extract insights from unstructured text data. You will engage in diverse projects, including topic modeling, entity recognition, text generation, creating ontologies, and conversational AI. This role requires a solid foundation in NLP, strong technical skills, and a passion for innovation and problem-solving.

Responsibilities

• Implement ML/GenAI architectural strategy and roadmap adapted to business stakeholders' vision and strategic objectives.
• Research, design, and develop solutions using NLP models and algorithms to extract insights from unstructured text data.
• Collaborate with data engineers to preprocess and clean text data for compatibility with NLP models.
• Apply machine learning and deep learning techniques for text classification, named entity recognition, knowledge search, topic modeling, and text generation.
• Build and leverage knowledge graphs to enhance language understanding and enable advanced NLP applications.
• Architect and advocate for AI/ML technologies that integrate smoothly with existing systems.
• Develop methods to utilize LLMs like GPT, BERT, and open-source foundational LLMs (Llama2) for natural language understanding and generation tasks.
• Conduct exploratory data analysis to gain insights into text data and develop effective preprocessing strategies.
• Integrate NLP models into our data pipelines and systems in collaboration with MLops Engineers.
• Evaluate and benchmark NLP algorithms, knowledge graph frameworks, and LLM architectures, recommending suitable approaches for specific use cases.
• Stay updated with the latest NLP, knowledge graphs, and LLM research and advancements to enhance our NLP capabilities.
• Communicate findings to technical and non-technical stakeholders through reports, visualizations, and presentations.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to define project goals, requirements, and success metrics.
• Engage with Enterprise Architects and MLOps Engineers to trial use cases and discuss architectural configurations.
• Mentor and guide junior team members to foster their growth in NLP.

About You

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Data Science, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• Proven experience as a Data Scientist with a focus on NLP and knowledge graphs. Familiarity with Azure Open AI and various foundational LLMs for Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) is desirable.
• Experience with graph machine learning (e.g., graph neural networks, graph data science) and practical applications, including knowledge graph creation and query languages like Cypher.
• Experience with LLM architecture (e.g., Transformer, GANs, VAEs), fine-tuning PEFT/LoRA, context embedding, vector databases, and semantic search techniques.
• Proficiency in Python and NLP libraries such as NLTK, spaCy, Transformers, Hugging Face, BERT, and Gen AI frameworks like Llangchain and Llamaindex.
• Experience with deep learning frameworks such as TensorFlow or PyTorch.
• Familiarity with Azure cloud platform services and distributed computing frameworks like SparkNLP is a plus.
• Research developments in InsurTech to propose and adapt open-source models and technology solutions.
• Strong problem-solving skills to handle complex NLP challenges.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills for effective teamwork.

What We Offer

Recognized and rewarded for a job well done, we offer a range of flexible benefits for you to choose from. Enjoy flexible working options, global career opportunities within the Allianz Group, and fantastic career development and training. Benefits include:

• Annual bonus scheme
• Car allowance
• 30 days holiday plus bank holidays