Director, AI & Machine Learning (Mars Veterinary Health)

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Summary and Qualifications:

As part of the Mars Petcare family of businesses, Mars Veterinary Health is a global network of veterinary practices made possible by 75,000 Associates who care for millions of pets across nearly 3,000 clinics in more than 20 countries each year. We are committed to leveraging our reach to make a long-term positive impact on people, pets, and the planet and know our Purpose – A BETTER WORLD FOR PETS – starts with the people who care for them. We strive to offer unparalleled veterinary care for pets by first and foremost enabling and empowering our Associates to do what they love, whether in primary, specialty, and emergency care or management and leadership.

Role Purpose

​Director of AI/ML Ops Engineering is responsible for overseeing design, development, and support of our machine operations. This includes the architecture and implementation of tools for model training, model monitoring, feature stores, model deployments, model maintenance, and model API integration. This role requires working with multiple levels of the organization, data science teams, application teams, security, software engineering, and business partners. It requires an experienced hands-on manager with excellent business acumen, very strong technical skills, and data modeling / data warehousing expertise. The expectation is that the candidate can lead long term infrastructure projects, create strategic roadmaps, and successfully lead, grow, and hire a team of ML Engineers.

Essential Responsibilities and Tasks:

• Live and exemplify the Five Principles of Mars, Inc. within self and team.
• Work closely with data scientists and IT in the design, development, and implementation of our Enterprise AI platform.
• Design, build, and maintain an industry leading ML Ops tech stack.
• Engage with business stakeholders to refine requirements, assist with framing business problems as machine learning problems, and help define success metrics.
• Design, build, and maintain a secure and scalable CI/CD framework for data science teams.
• Implement roadmaps and design plans to facilitate teams moving from on-prem to cloud.
• Project management experience – schedule management, resource management, issue management, etc.
• Establish and maintain regular written and in-person communications with leadership, department heads, and end users regarding pertinent department activities.
• Provide technical leadership throughout the entire machine learning lifecycle, in collaboration with architecture, security, risk, operations, and other partner organizations.
• Other job duties as assigned.

Special Working Conditions:

• Ability to work at a computer for long periods of time. 
• Project timelines and work volume/deadlines may often require more than 40 hours per week to complete essential duties of this job.
• Must have mental processes for reasoning, remembering, mathematics and language ability (reading, writing, and speaking the English language) to perform the duties proficiently.
• Ability to carry out instructions furnished in written, oral, or diagram form and to solve problems involving several variables.
• Ability to stand, walk, stoop, kneel, crouch, and climb as well as manipulate (lift, carry, move) up to 50 pounds.
• Requires good hand-eye coordination, arm-hand-finger dexterity with the ability to grasp, and visual acuity to use a keyboard and operate necessary equipment.
• The noise level in the work environment is normally moderate.
• Environment where pets are present.

Experience, Education and/or Training:

• 7+ years’ experience as ML engineer or lead data scientist in a Big Data ecosystem, with a desire to assume greater responsibilities as a leader and mentor, while still being hands-on.
• 5+ years’ experience developing and operationalizing enterprise ML models at scale.
• 5+ years’ experience with public cloud platforms & systems (AWS, GCP, Azure). Azure is preferred.
• Must have experience with the development, production, and support of AI models with languages/text.
• The ideal candidate will have strong organizational skills and the ability to manage a diverse workload in a fast-paced environment.
• Strong working experience with big data, data lakes/data mesh/lake house architectures, and ML data engineering processes, tools & techniques
• Strong technical expertise in scripting (Python) database languages (SQL), and PySpark for model development.
• Solid grasp of core algorithms, deep neural networks, and LLMs/SLMs with hands on experience with data/feature engineering, training, orchestration, model deployment/serving, model monitoring, and governance utilizing modern ML frameworks, libraries, and tools
• Experience in performing a variety of complicated tasks while collaborating with data scientists and data and ML engineers in selecting and evaluating ML models and algorithms.
• Excellent time management and planning skills, organized with the ability to multi-task, exceptional follow-up skills and able to meet deadlines.
• Experience in tracking projects and goals to successful completion (with visible metrics).
• Excellent written, oral, and interpersonal communication skills, with ability to communicate effectively.
• Understanding and experience with Agile methodologies.
• Ability to manage multiple projects concurrently.

Salary range: $169,371 - $254,057

What We Offer – The Good Stuff:

• Competitive salary with paid time off & holidays so you can spend time with the people you love.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your loved ones.
• Fertility and family-building assistance.
• Paid Parental leave.
• Practice Paid Basic Life Insurance.
• Practice Paid Short- and Long-Term Disability.
• Competitive referral program – join our team, bring your friends, and get paid.
• Automatic enrollment 401(k) Savings Plan after 60 days of employment with generous company match.
• Commuter Benefits.
• Legal Plan.
• Health Savings Account & Flexible Spending Account.
• Mental health support and resources.
• Paid Volunteering.
• Optimum Wellness Plans® for up to three pets.
• Continuing Education allowance & MED hours for eligible positions.
• Student Debt Relief (for full-time DVMs).
• A Variety of discounts including Mars, PetSmart, Royal Canin, fitness, cellular and so much more.

WE ARE A DRUG-FREE, SMOKE-FREE, EQUAL OPPORTUNITY EMPLOYER.

Mars Veterinary Health (MVH)® strongly supports and values the uniqueness of all individuals and promotes a work environment where diversity is embraced. MVH is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, genetic information, status as a protected veteran, or status as a qualified individual with disability. MVH complies with all applicable federal, state and local laws governing nondiscrimination in employment in every MVH location.