Director II, Data Science, Solaria Labs

Who We Are

Solaria Labs (https://www.solarialabs.com) is Liberty Mutual’s Enterprise Incubator. We partner with teams from across Liberty to stay on the forefront of disruption, incubating new products, services, and experiences to better serve our customers, agents, and partners today and in the future. Current areas of focus include Embedding AI for Transformation, Digitizing the Insurance Value Chain, Risk Management & Mitigation, and programming designed to foster a culture of innovation at LM. Current examples of programs aligned to these focus areas include digital-first insurance platforms for personal and business lines, exploring application of AI to enhance our underwriting processes, and new risk services like real-time weather alerting to help our customers stay safe and protect the things they care about most.

Role Description

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are woven into the fabric of many of our incubation programs, with great potential to create more value for our customers and strengthen our competitive advantage. As Head of Solaria Applied Science, you will lead the team that applies AI/ML to create

disruptive new capabilities for Liberty Mutual. This will require you to build a deep understanding of the business, create strong partnerships with other teams, understand how AI/ML can be applied to differentiate our products, develop proofs of concept with your team, and guide the organization to prioritize highest value features. Successful candidates will have a deep understanding of AI/ML techniques and the ability to translate those techniques into business impact. Examples include identifying property features from Aerial Imagery using computer vision, classifying businesses from documents using natural language processing, optimizing the performance of our digital insurance

offerings, and applying generative AI to make our business more efficient and effective.

Specific Responsibilities Include

• Partnering with our Incubation Leads and business stakeholders to Source, Explore, Experiment, and Scale advanced data-driven solutions, including partnering closely with BU Data Science Teams to ensure seamless hand-offs
• Translate and champion ML capabilities for non-technical audiences, both partners and senior executives, to help the organization prioritize
• Manage and mentor a multi-disciplinary team of ~8 or more data scientists, including managers, interns, co-ops, and other staff on rotating assignment
• Lead the team to design and deploy AI/ML models using generative AI, computer vision, and natural language processing
• Work with product and engineering teams to implement your solutions within internal and customer facing capabilities
• Partner with data science team to ensure highest standard of technical excellence for all data science efforts in the lab, adopting best practices from other organizations and vetting new technologies or frameworks as appropriate
• Coordinate Solaria’s applied science IP strategy, determining what the organization should focus on to protect our business. This also includes educating data scientists on the importance of IP and helping them choose whether to patent or publish their work
• Contribute to the data science professional community at Liberty, helping to guide programs and processes that improve technical excellence, engagement, and diversity
• Ability to work EST if based in Seattle

Technical Expertise and Leadership

• Competencies typically acquired through an advanced degree (in Statistics, Mathematics, Data Science or other relevant field of study) and 5 to 7 years of relevant experience or may be acquired through a Bachelor`s degree (scientific field of study) with 10 years of relevant experience.  Given the degree to which this role will be partnering with our Incubation Leads and our business stakeholders, the ability to work closely with non-technical audiences is a must.
• 3-5+ years of management experience and track record of keeping team highly engaged required
• Proficiency in Python, additional knowledge in other programming languages such as SQL, C++ is a plus
• Experience with the Python data science and machine learning ecosystem, ideally with an understanding of PyTorch a plus
• Practical experience with cloud platforms like AWS (preferably), Google Cloud, or Azure a plus
• Familiarity with data pipeline and workflow management tools like Airflow, among others
• Desirable if the individual has experience with recommender systems and reinforcement learning
• Understanding of big data tools such as Hadoop, Spark, etc. is advantageous
• Leadership experience within a corporate, academic, or startup innovation environment is beneficial
• Established knowledge and practical experience in areas like computer vision, natural language processing, and generative AI
• Possess strong analytical, strategic, project management, decision-making and problem-solving skills
• Ability to thrive in a fast-paced environment with significant uncertainty