Lead Data Scientist (AI/ML)

Location: Bethesda, Maryland, United States; office-based

Salary: $146,600–$197,900 annual

Company

Total Wine & More is a retail company with a Data Services team focused on using data science and AI to improve strategic decision-making and operational efficiency.

What you will do

• Frame complex, multidimensional business problems and design scalable machine learning and AI solutions.
• Prepare data, engineer features, train models, tune hyperparameters, and validate robustness.
• Evaluate models using statistical metrics, fairness and bias assessments, error analysis, and business-outcome measures.
• Deploy production ML systems with packaging, system integration, automated workflows, error handling, and maintainable documentation.
• Monitor deployed models, detect data drift, trigger retraining, and implement logging and alerting.
• Mentor junior team members and communicate technical trade-offs, model results, and business impact to leadership and stakeholders.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in data science, computer science, mathematics, statistics, economics, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• 5–8 years of experience in data science, predictive analytics, econometrics, software engineering, data engineering, or a related field.
• Expert-level Python and SQL skills, including production-grade coding and large-scale query optimization.
• Experience designing advanced ML and AI solutions, scalable feature engineering strategies, training pipelines, and hyperparameter optimization.
• Experience with model validation and governance, fairness and bias audits, error analysis, CI/CD, containerization, orchestration, and cloud reliability standards.
• Experience building model monitoring, drift detection, retraining, and alerting workflows.

Nice to have

• Master’s degree in computer science, mathematics, statistics, or a related field.

Culture & Benefits

• Paid time off and paid parental leave.
• Medical, prescription, dental, vision, disability, and life insurance coverage.
• 401(k), HSA, FSA, and pre-tax commuter benefits.
• Store discounts, pet insurance, critical illness and accident insurance, and discounted home and auto insurance.
• College tuition assistance, career development, product training, and consumer classes.