Data Scientist – NLP / Generative AI

Data Scientist – NLP / Generative AI Location: Hybrid – Arlington, Virginia Employment Type: Full-time

BizFirst is assisting our client with the hiring of a Data Scientist specializing in natural language processing and generative AI to help the organization move from early experimentation into production-ready AI capabilities. This is a hands‑on research and engineering role where you will own the design and delivery of NLP and GenAI solutions applied directly to the client’s most complex internal workflows. Our client is a mid‑market professional services organization that is actively rethinking how it designs and executes its core business operations through artificial intelligence and automation. The company is building a dedicated AI capability to embed machine learning and generative AI into its most critical internal workflows – from decision support and process automation to real‑time analytics and intelligent document processing.

What will you do

The ideal candidate brings 5–8 years of applied data science experience with a deep specialization in NLP and a working command of modern generative AI techniques. You have built production NLP systems, worked with transformer‑based architectures, and have direct experience with large language models – including fine‑tuning, prompt engineering, and retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG). You are comfortable moving between research and engineering as the work demands.

Responsibilities

• Design and build NLP and generative AI solutions applied to internal business processes, including document understanding, classification, summarization, and conversational AI.
• Develop, fine‑tune, and evaluate large language models and transformer‑based architectures for domain‑specific applications.
• Build and iterate on retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG) systems, embedding pipelines, and vector search infrastructure.
• Work closely with business and operations stakeholders to scope problems, define evaluation criteria, and validate model outputs against real‑world requirements.
• Analyze and interpret model behavior, identify failure modes, and develop mitigation strategies to ensure reliable, responsible outputs.
• Collaborate with ML engineers and platform teams to move experiments into production pipelines.
• Document experimental methodology, data lineage, and model evaluations to support reproducibility and knowledge sharing.
• Stay current on developments in NLP research and GenAI tooling, bringing relevant advances into the team’s work quickly.

Requirements

• US Citizen or Permanent Resident authorized to work in the United States.
• Experience: 5–8 years of applied data science experience with a strong focus on natural language processing and text‑based systems.
• NLP & GenAI: Hands‑on experience with transformer architectures (BERT, GPT, T5, or similar), fine‑tuning workflows, and production deployment of language models.
• RAG & Embeddings: Direct experience building retrieval‑augmented generation pipelines, vector databases (Pinecone, Weaviate, FAISS, or equivalent), and semantic search systems.
• Programming: Strong Python skills; proficiency with HuggingFace Transformers, LangChain, or similar GenAI tooling.
• Evaluation: Experience designing rigorous evaluation frameworks for generative models, including human evaluation, LLM‑as‑judge approaches, and automated benchmarking.
• Preferred: Experience applying NLP in a professional services, legal, finance, or consulting domain.
• Preferred: Familiarity with responsible AI practices, including bias assessment, output auditing, and hallucination mitigation.
• Preferred: Background in information extraction, named entity recognition (NER), or document intelligence.
• Preferred: Experience with cloud‑based GenAI services (OpenAI API, Anthropic API, AWS Bedrock, Azure OpenAI, or GCP Vertex AI).
• Graduate degree (MS or PhD) in Computer Science, Computational Linguistics, Statistics, or a related field.

Benefits

• Family Health Care (54% cost covered for the entire family)
• Family Dental (54% cost covered for the entire family)
• Family Vision (54% cost covered for the entire family)
• Flexible Spending Account
• Performance bonuses tied to project and delivery milestones
• Lifetime Event Bonuses (e.g., new child, marriage)
• Profit‑sharing arrangement for any work brought into the company
• Unlimited Leave with Approval
• 401k – 100% employer match on first 4% invested
• $1,500 annual training and conference budget

Job Type: Full-time, Permanent Position Work Authorization: US Citizen or Permanent Resident; no active security clearance required. Schedule: Monday to Friday Work Location: Hybrid – Arlington, Virginia