Senior Data Scientist

Company: Cognizant
Location: Morrisville
Posted on: October 29, 2025

Job Description:

Title: Senior Data Scientist We are Cognizant AIA - Artificial Intelligence and Analytics About AI & Analytics: Artificial intelligence (AI) and the data it collects and analyzes will soon sit at the core of all intelligent, human-centric businesses. By decoding customer needs, preferences, and behaviors, our clients can understand exactly what services, products, and experiences their consumers need. Within AI & Analytics, we work to design the future—a future in which trial-and-error business decisions have been replaced by informed choices and data-supported strategies! By applying AI and data science, we help leading companies to prototype, refine, validate, and scale their AI and analytics products and delivery models! Cognizant’s AIA practice takes insights that are buried in data and provide businesses with a clear way to transform how they source, interpret, and consume their information. Our clients need flexible data structures and a streamlined data architecture that quickly turns data resources into informative, meaningful intelligence. Location: Raleigh, NC As a Senior Data Scientist at Cognizant, you will play a crucial role in engineering modern businesses to improve everyday life. You will be instrumental in driving new product development within a collaborative team environment, writing production code in both run-time and build-time environments. Your role will involve proposing and building data-driven solutions to address high-value customer problems. You will work with large-scale natural language datasets, including matter and contract repositories, invoice/legal spend data, and work management. Your contributions will be pivotal in prototyping new ideas and collaborating with other data scientists, product designers, data engineers, front-end developers, and expert legal data annotators. You will experience the dynamic culture of a start-up while leveraging the extensive resources of an established company. An ideal candidate will possess a strong passion for advancing beyond Jupyter Notebooks and consistently delivering production-ready code each sprint RESPONSIBILITIES • Develop and implement LLM-based applications tailored for in-house legal needs, ensuring they align with Cognizant's commitment to excellence and innovation • Evaluate and maintain our data assets and training/evaluation datasets, ensuring they meet the highest standards of integrity and quality. • Design and build pipelines for preprocessing, annotating, and managing legal document datasets, fostering a customer-centric mindset. • Collaborate with legal experts to understand requirements and ensure models meet domain-specific needs, working as one team. • Conduct experiments and evaluate model performance to drive continuous improvements, raising the bar in all deliverables. • Evaluate AI/ML and GenAI outcomes, both human and automated, to ensure accuracy, reliability, and alignment with business objectives. • Interface with other technical personnel or team members to finalize requirements, demonstrating ownership of outcomes. • Work closely with other development team members to understand complex product requirements and translate them into software designs, ensuring ethical choices in all actions. • Successfully implement development processes, coding best practices, and code reviews for production environments, embodying Cognizant's values in every task. REQUIREMENTS • Strong hands-on experience and foundations in machine learning, including dimensionality reduction, clustering, embeddings, and sequence classification algorithms. • Experience with deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, and Hugging Face Transformers. • Practical experience in Natural Language Processing methods and libraries such as spaCy, word2vec, TensorFlow, Keras, PyTorch, Flair, BERT. • Practical experience with large language models, prompt engineering, fine-tuning, and benchmarking using frameworks such as LangChain and LlamaIndex. • Strong Python background. • Knowledge of AWS, GCP, Azure, or other cloud platforms. • Understanding of data modeling principles and complex data models. • Proficiency with relational and NoSQL databases as well as vector stores (e.g., Postgres, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, ChromaDB). • Knowledge of Scala, Spark, Ray, or other distributed computing systems is highly preferred. • Knowledge of API development, containerization, and machine learning deployment is highly preferred. • Experience with ML Ops/AI Ops is highly preferred. LI-SM1 Salary and Other Compensation: Applications will be accepted until September 30 2025 The annual salary for this position is between $140k - 150k depending on experience and other qualifications of the successful candidate. This position is also eligible for Cognizant’s discretionary annual incentive program, based on performance and subject to the terms of Cognizant’s applicable plans. Benefits: Cognizant offers the following benefits for this position, subject to applicable eligibility requirements: · Medical/Dental/Vision/Life Insurance· Paid holidays plus Paid Time Off· 401(k) plan and contributions· Long-term/Short-term Disability· Paid Parental Leave· Employee Stock Purchase Plan Disclaimer: The salary, other compensation, and benefits information is accurate as of the date of this posting. Cognizant reserves the right to modify this information at any time, subject to applicable law.

Keywords: Cognizant, Cary , Senior Data Scientist, IT / Software / Systems , Morrisville, North Carolina