Lead Data Scientist

Job Title: Lead Data Scientist Banking

Experience: 5+ Years

Location: Bangalore / Pune / Gurgaon / Hyderabad

Industry: Banking & Financial Services

Job Summary

EXL Service is hiring a Lead Data Scientist with strong expertise in Generative AI / LLMs, Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Deep Learning. The role requires hands-on model development experience, exposure to banking and financial services projects, and the ability to lead and mentor a team of data scientists and ML engineers.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and deploy machine learning and deep learning models for banking use cases.
• Build and implement Generative AI and LLM-based solutions for enterprise applications.
• Develop NLP pipelines for processing structured and unstructured financial data.
• Lead end-to-end model development including data preparation, feature engineering, training, validation, and deployment.
• Work with cross-functional teams including data engineering, product, and client stakeholders.
• Manage and mentor a team of data scientists and machine learning engineers.
• Translate business problems into scalable data science solutions.
• Participate in client discussions, solution design, and technical presentations.
• Ensure model governance, documentation, and compliance with industry standards.

Core Skills Required

Generative AI / LLM

• Minimum 12 years of hands-on experience with Generative AI or LLM-based solutions
• Prompt engineering and LLM application development
• Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) architectures
• Experience with LLM frameworks such as LangChain or LlamaIndex
• Experience working with vector databases
• Natural Language Processing (NLP)
• Text classification and document processing
• Named Entity Recognition (NER)
• Sentiment analysis and topic modeling
• Financial document processing and information extraction
• NLP model development using transformer-based architectures
• Model training, evaluation, and optimization
• Deployment of deep learning models in production environments

Banking Domain Experience (Mandatory)

Candidates must have experience working on banking or financial services analytics projects, including but not limited to:

• Fraud detection and fraud analytics
• Transaction monitoring
• Credit risk analytics
• Anti-Money Laundering (AML)
• Customer analytics and segmentation
• Financial document processing

Technical Skills

• Programming: Python, SQL
• Machine Learning: Scikit-learn, ML model development and evaluation
• Deep Learning: TensorFlow, PyTorch
• NLP: NLTK, SpaCy, Hugging Face Transformers
• GenAI: LLM APIs, prompt engineering, RAG frameworks
• Data Processing: Pandas, NumPy
• Cloud Platforms: AWS / Azure / GCP
• MLOps and model deployment frameworks

Leadership & Collaboration

• Experience leading or mentoring data science teams
• Ability to manage end-to-end AI project delivery
• Experience working in client-facing environments
• Strong communication and stakeholder management skills

Education

• Bachelors or Masters degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, Statistics, or related field