[Remote] Director, AI/ML Transformation

Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Unum is a Fortune 500 company and leading provider of employee benefits, headquartered in Chattanooga, TN. They are seeking a Director of AI/ML Transformation to lead the strategic direction for AI/ML initiatives, design advanced models, and operationalize AI solutions while ensuring responsible AI practices and fostering team development.

Responsibilities

• Lead AI/ML Strategy and Roadmap – Define and oversee the strategic direction for AI/ML transformation initiatives, aligning model development and deployment with overall business goals
• Design and Develop Advanced Models – Architect, train, and validate machine learning and generative AI models (including supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning approaches) to solve complex business problems
• Implement and Operationalize AI Solutions – Translate model outputs into production-ready digital products, ensuring scalability, robustness, and integration with existing enterprise systems
• Model Governance and Risk Management – Establish and enforce responsible AI practices including explainability, fairness, bias detection, security, and regulatory compliance throughout the AI lifecycle
• Cross-Functional Collaboration – Partner with product managers, engineers, data scientists, and business leaders to identify high-value use cases and drive adoption of AI/ML capabilities
• Performance Monitoring and Continuous Improvement – Implement monitoring frameworks to track accuracy, drift, and performance of deployed models, ensuring timely retraining and updates
• Team Leadership and Talent Development – Mentor and guide data science and engineering teams, fostering a culture of innovation, experimentation, and best practices in AI/ML
• Stakeholder Communication – Present technical concepts and business impact of AI/ML initiatives to executive leadership, external partners, and non-technical audiences in a clear and compelling way
• Innovation and Research – Stay current on emerging AI/ML methodologies, tools, and industry trends; pilot new technologies such as large language models and generative AI to maintain a competitive edge

Skills

• Bachelor's degree in AI/ML, Data Science or related analytical field plus 5 years of related experience
• Master's degree in AI/ML, Data Science or related analytical field plus 3 years of related experience
• 5 years of experience with a Bachelor's degree, or 3 years with a Master's degree, with the following: Statistics, calculus, and algorithm-based mathematics; building generalized linear models, and processing/analyzing time series data
• Coding abilities with an emphasis on Python and understanding many ML/AI based Python libraries, including Scikit-Learn, NumPy, pandas, and OpenCV
• Deep-learning (neural network) model building, training, and deployment, with PyTorch or Tensorflow
• Other forms of supervised learning, unsupervised learning, and optimization algorithms
• Experience with building gradient boosted tree models (LightGBM or XGBoost)
• DevOps and the ownership of a model's lifecycle, including experimentation, deployment, monitoring of feature drift and inference performance, model evaluation, and model iteration
• Feature engineering for model performance improvement and data leakage prevention
• Working with healthcare-related claims data
• Version control of code, with a git-based code version control and repository system
• 4 years of experience with a Bachelor's degree, or 2 years of experience with a Master's degree, with the following: AI/ML cloud platforms (Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, or Microsoft Azure) and leveraging one or more of these platforms to deploy AI solutions
• Optical Character Recognition (OCR) in Python
• Experience with document processing, handwriting recognition, and document classification
• Querying relational databases (SQL) and non-relational databases (MongoDB) from a Python environment
• 2 years of experience with a Bachelor's degree, or any amount of experience with a Master's degree with the following: Generative AI/large language model applications
• Must be able to run off-the-shelf open-source LLMs and call commercial LLM APIs in a Python environment
• Fine-tuning LLMs/VLMs using PEFT (LoRA/QLoRA), plus quantization (4/8-bit, AWQ/GPTQ) for efficient, scalable inference
• Experience with data prep, evaluation, and deployment (Hugging Face or vLLM)

Benefits

• Health, Vision, Dental
• Short & Long-Term Disability
• Generous PTO (including paid time to volunteer!)
• Up to 9.5% 401(k) employer contribution
• Mental health support
• Career advancement opportunities
• Student loan repayment options
• Tuition reimbursement
• Flexible work environments
• Performance-based incentive plans

Company Overview

• Since our founding in 1848, Unum has been a leader in the employee benefits business through innovation, integrity and an unwavering commitment to our customers. It was founded in 1848, and is headquartered in Chattanooga, Tennessee, USA, with a workforce of 10001+ employees. Its website is http://www.unum.com.

Company H1B Sponsorship

• Unum has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships, with 27 in 2025, 23 in 2024, 26 in 2023, 19 in 2022, 18 in 2021, 7 in 2020. Please note that this does not guarantee sponsorship for this specific role.

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