AI Data Scientist Team Lead
Job Summary
The AI Data Scientist Team Lead (Manager, AI Platform Engineering) architects end-to-end AI solutions and leads the AI Platform team for Geisinger's AI Department. This is a hands-on technical leadership role, splitting time equally between solution architecture and engineering management (50% technical / 50% leadership). On the technical side, the Team Lead serves as the solution architect across the AI Platform portfolio: gathering requirements from clinical informaticists, data scientists, and business stakeholders; designing production-grade AI architectures spanning batch and real-time workloads; and making build-vs-buy calls for emerging AI capabilities. On the management side, the Team Lead runs the team's rituals, removes blockers, develops direct reports, and manages stakeholder expectations. The AI Platform team is an enabling team—not a delivery team—that builds the reusable capabilities, tooling, and infrastructure that let product teams deploy AI safely and quickly. The team consists of 8 engineers across 6 distinct roles (4 direct reports + 3 matrixed engineers from partner departments), currently supporting 10 platform capabilities serving 70 AI programs. The Team Lead owns the team's capability roadmap, capacity allocation, platform engineering standards, and architecture reviews, while translating organizational AI strategy into executable technical plans that deliver production-grade capabilities across the portfolio.
Job Duties
What You Will Own:
- Solution architecture across all platform capabilities (agentic AI systems, RAG pipelines, multi-model orchestration, real-time and batch ML infrastructure)
- Requirements gathering and technical specification for AI programs across clinical and operational domains
- Build-vs-buy and technology selection decisions for emerging AI capabilities, including generative AI, foundation models, and LLM applications
- Platform engineering standards, architecture reviews, and governance compliance (HIPAA, AI risk management, responsible AI principles)
- Team roadmap, capacity allocation, and intake triage for platform support requests
- People management, career development, and performance evaluation for 4 direct reports (3 MLOps Engineers, 1 Full Stack Engineer)
- Work direction, priorities, platform standards, and formal performance input for 3 matrixed engineers from partner departments (Sr. Platform Data Engineer, Sr. Software Engineer for Integration & Interfaces, Sr. Platform Engineer)
What You Will Not Own:
- Individual capability delivery (delegated to the team via RACI)
- Product strategy or portfolio prioritization (owned by the AI Product Management function)
- Discipline-specific technical standards (set department-wide by the MLOps and Data Science Technical Discipline Leads; set by home-department tech leads for matrixed engineers)
- HR management or final performance evaluations for matrixed engineers (owned by their home departments)
- Day-to-day Databricks workspace administration (owned by the Sr. Platform Data Engineer)
Solution Architecture Responsibilities (50% Technical):
- Design scalable AI architectures spanning batch and real-time workloads, ensuring solutions are production-grade, maintainable, and aligned with organizational priorities
- Gather and refine requirements from clinical informaticists, data scientists, and business stakeholders; translate complex needs into actionable technical specifications
- Architect agentic AI systems, RAG pipelines, and multi-model orchestration frameworks across clinical and operational domains
- Serve as technical authority on end-to-end AI pipeline design across Databricks, cloud-native platforms, and Epic integration points
- Drive build-vs-buy and technology selection decisions for emerging AI capabilities (generative AI, foundation models, LLM applications)
- Ensure AI systems adhere to healthcare security standards (HIPAA), AI governance frameworks, and responsible AI principles
- Partner with data architects and governance teams to enforce data quality, lineage, and access controls across AI data assets
Engineering Management Responsibilities (50% Leadership):
- Lead multiple concurrent AI projects; manage scope, timelines, and technical risk while removing obstacles for the team
- Mentor and develop 4 direct-report engineers; provide technical leadership and formal performance input for 3 matrixed engineers
- Establish platform engineering best practices, conduct architecture reviews, and foster engineering excellence across the full team
- Align technical execution with strategic goals; contribute data-driven insights to inform organizational AI initiatives
- Coordinate cross-functional collaboration between the AI Platform team and data scientists, software engineers, clinical informaticists, and business stakeholders
- Champion scalable and governed AI practices across the organization
- Run team rituals (daily standups, weekly planning, architecture office hours, biweekly demos, monthly capability health reviews, quarterly roadmap refresh)
How the Role Operates:
- Prioritization: The Team Lead owns the team's roadmap, balancing strategic alignment (capabilities that unblock the highest-value portfolio initiatives), breadth of impact (work that benefits the most programs wins over single-program requests), and operational urgency (production incidents, security issues, governance blockers jump the queue)
- Intake: Product teams request platform support through a lightweight intake process the Team Lead manages; requests are triaged weekly—absorbed into the roadmap, handled as quick-turn asks, or redirected to self-serve documentation
- Matrix management: For direct reports, owns the full management stack (roadmap, career development, performance, HR). For matrixed engineers, owns the work (roadmap, priorities, platform standards, architecture reviews) and provides formal input on performance reviews; the engineer's home department owns HR management and final evaluation
- Escalation path: Engineer-level issues resolved directly between engineers; priority conflicts, scope disagreements, and technical decisions with broad impact come to the Team Lead; strategic trade-offs and cross-department conflicts escalate to the VP
Work is typically performed in an office or remote environment. Accountable for satisfying all job specific obligations and complying with all organization policies and procedures. The specific statements in this profile are not intended to be all-inclusive. They represent typical elements considered necessary to successfully perform the job.
*Relevant experience may be a combination of related work experience and degree obtained (Master's Degree = 2 years; PHD = 4 years ).
Position Details
Key Technologies:
Databricks (Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, MLflow, Mosaic AI, Spark)
AWS (ECS/Fargate, Bedrock, S3, IAM), Terraform
Claude / Amazon Bedrock, LangChain, agentic AI frameworks
Epic APIs (FHIR, SDE)
Docker, CI/CD pipelines, MLOps tooling
Real-time streaming (Kafka, Spark Structured Streaming)
Collaboration Points:
All AI Platform team roles: direct manager, solution reviewer, escalation point
Clinical informaticists and data scientists: requirements gathering and solution design
AI Product Management: roadmap alignment and portfolio prioritization
AI Department Technical Discipline Leads (MLOps, Data Science): alignment on discipline-specific standards applied to platform work
AI Governance: compliance with risk frameworks, responsible AI principles, and model risk management
Enterprise architecture and security: alignment of AI Platform infrastructure with organizational standards
Partner department managers (IT Platform, IT Software, CDIO Data Management): matrix coordination for matrixed engineers
Required Skills & Qualifications:
8+ years in data science, ML engineering, or AI solution architecture, with at least 3 years in a technical leadership or engineering management role
Demonstrated experience designing production ML/AI systems end-to-end: from data ingestion through model serving and monitoring
Strong fluency in Python and SQL; hands-on experience with Databricks (MLflow, Unity Catalog, Spark) and cloud-native ML infrastructure (AWS preferred)
Experience architecting agentic AI systems, LLM applications, or RAG pipelines in production settings
Proven ability to translate ambiguous business problems into technical specifications and actionable engineering plans
Track record of mentoring engineers across multiple specialties and managing concurrent technical projects
Familiarity with healthcare data standards (HL7/FHIR) and regulatory requirements (HIPAA) strongly preferred
Experience with Epic integration points (FHIR, SDE) a plus
MS or PhD in Computer Science, Data Science, or related quantitative field preferred; equivalent experience accepted
Education
Bachelor's Degree- (Required)Experience
Minimum of 6 years-Relevant experience* (Required)Skills
Group Collaboration; Critical Thinking; Programming Languages; Machine Learning Methods; Data Analysis; Leadership; Clinical Databases; Communication; Data Presentations; Structured Query Language (SQL); Analyzing, processing and building AI/ML solutions from Clinical and Operational data sources, such as Epic Clarity, HL7, DICOM, or ECG dataAbout Geisinger
Founded more than 100 years ago by Abigail Geisinger, the system now includes ten hospital campuses, a 550,000-member health plan, two research centers and the Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine. With nearly 24,000 employees and more than 1,700 employed physicians, Geisinger boosts its hometown economies in Pennsylvania by billions of dollars annually. Learn more at geisinger.org or connect with us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter.
Equal Opportunity Employer
All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, pregnancy, genetic information, disability, status as a protected veteran, or any other protected category under applicable federal, state, and local laws.
Our Vision & Values
Everything we do is about making better health easier for our patients, our members, our students, our Geisinger family and our communities.
KINDNESS: We strive to treat everyone as we would hope to be treated ourselves.
EXCELLENCE: We treasure colleagues who humbly strive for excellence.
LEARNING: We share our knowledge with the best and brightest to better prepare the caregivers for tomorrow.
INNOVATION: We constantly seek new and better ways to care for our patients, our members, our community, and the nation.
SAFETY: We provide a safe environment for our patients and members and the Geisinger family.
Our Benefits
We offer healthcare benefits for full time and part time positions from day one, including vision, dental and prescription coverage.
A place where you can lead a healthy lifestyle and follow your dreams.
Only at Geisinger.
Best employer for healthy lifestyles – National Business Group
Access to 121 state parks
