JOB DESCRIPTION
Your Role

The Advanced Analytics team works in partnership across the entire Blue Shield of CA enterprise to accelerate business outcomes through the application of AI/machine learning, statistical methodologies, or unstructured data analysis techniques to uncover insights, predict behaviors, and ultimately drive automation to create “intelligence at scale”. The Data Scientist, Principal will report to the Director, Advanced Analytics. In this role you will solve problems which range from but are not limited to, text analytics of customer feedback, conversations and clinical notes, predicting clinical disease progression, understanding the impact of population health programs, clustering member behaviors, creating propensity models, and geospatial analysis of populations to uncover social determinants of health.

Your Work

In this role, you will:

• Act as the subject matter expert in the area of applied ML to claim, premium, member, risk scores, or other business relevant contexts
• Collaborate with product owners and business stakeholders to identify opportunities to optimize processes and decision-making. Evaluate business requirements and develop recommendations execution plan (i.e. CRISP-DM) if a machine learning solution is warranted. This includes and assumes the ability to create new, business relevant, health-care specific ML models
• Partner with product owners to drive lifecycle of machine learning project from ideation to model deployment. This includes and assumes the ability to delivers projects and models on time, as well as team-based accountability to maintain traceable documentation on ML models
• Perform scientific literature review to inform statistical modelling approaches and best practices to achieve model validity
• Translate business requirements into machine learning technical specifications, and partner with data engineers to design scalable pipelines based on defined requirements
• Help the team move from on-prem infrastructure to the cloud
• Translate text based data to feature data sets used to power our predictive analytics
• Anticipate and prevent problems and roadblocks before they occur
• Help the team establish a MLOps framework for managing applications
• Develop materials to explain project findings
• Mentor less experienced members of the team
• Other projects or duties as assigned

QUALIFICATIONS
Your Knowledge and Experience

• Requires college degree in mathematics, statistics, computer science or equivalent quantitative scientific discipline
• Requires a minimum of 6 to 7 years of professional Data Science or ML experience; or a Ph.D. degree in operations research, applied statistics, data mining, machine learning, or other quantitative discipline
• Be able to demonstrate real-world experience to translate business problems into ML problem
• Demonstrate ability to communicate AI-recommendations in a business-context to general non-technical audience
• High proficiency in scalable data transformation techniques using SQL, SAS, Spark or equivalent
• Expert in open-source languages such as Python, R, and Julia
• Hands on experience with cloud environments such as Azure and Google Cloud
• Understanding of statistical methods and advanced modeling techniques (e.g., SVM, K-Means, Random Forest, Boosting, Bayesian inference, natural language processing)
• Extensive experience with machine learning and deep learning packages (scikit-learn, XGBoost, Tensorflow or PyTorch)
• Experience evaluating solutions for fairness, bias, accuracy, drift, validity, fit, robustness and explainability
• Solid MLOps practices including good design documentation, unit testing, integration testing and version control (git)
• Proficient in experimentation design and A/B testing
• Ability to partner, collaborate with, and lead relevant stakeholders across diverse functions and experience levels
  

Pay Range:

The pay range for this role is: $ 145200.00 to $ 217800.00 for California.

Note:

Please note that this range represents the pay range for this and many other positions at Blue Shield that fall into this pay grade. Blue Shield salaries are based on a variety of factors, including the candidate's experience, location (California, Bay area, or outside California), and current employee salaries for similar roles.

ABOUT THE TEAM
Blue Shield of California’s mission is to ensure all Californians have access to high-quality health care at a sustainably affordable price. We are transforming health care in a way that truly serves our nonprofit mission by lowering costs, improving quality, and enhancing the member and physician experience.

To fulfill our mission, we must ensure a diverse, equitable, and inclusive environment where all employees can be their authentic selves and fully contribute to meet the needs of the multifaceted communities we serve. Our comprehensive approach to diversity, equity, and inclusion combines a focus on our people, processes, and systems with a deep commitment to promoting social justice and health equity through our products, business practices, and presence as a corporate citizen.

Blue Shield has received awards and recognition for being a certified Great Place to Work, best place to work for LGBTQ equality, leading disability employer, one of the best companies for women to advance, Bay Area’s top companies in volunteering & giving, and one of the world’s most ethical companies. Here at Blue Shield of California, we are striving to make a positive change across our industry and the communities we live in – join us!

Our Values:

• Honest . We hold ourselves to the highest ethical and integrity standards. We build trust by doing what we say we're going to do and by acknowledging and correcting where we fall short.
• Human . We strive to be our authentic selves, listening and communicating effectively, and showing empathy towards others by walking in their shoes.
• Courageous . We stand up for what we believe in and are committed to the hard work necessary to achieve our ambitious goals.

From the earliest days of the pandemic, Blue Shield of California has been unyielding in our commitment to putting the health and safety of our people, our members and our communities first. As a health care company, Blue Shield requires all employees to be up to date with COVID-19 vaccination prior to start date as a condition of employment. Blue Shield will consider requests for medical or religious accommodation to this vaccination requirement prior to your start date.

The definition of "up to date with your COVID-19 vaccine" is when you have received all doses in the primary series and one booster when eligible. If you are unable to be up to date with your COVID-19 vaccine by your start date, your start date will need to be postponed and you will have 30 days to remedy. If you cannot fulfill the requirement nor obtain an accommodation within 30 days, your offer will be rescinded.