Principal Data Scientist - Digital Health

Principal Data Scientist – Digital Health

At Alcon, we are driven by the meaningful work we do to help people see brilliantly. We innovate boldly, champion progress, and act with speed as the global leader in eye care. Here, you’ll be recognized for your commitment and contributions and see your career like never before. Together, we go above and beyond to make an impact in the lives of our patients and customers.

We foster an inclusive culture and are looking for diverse, talented people to join Alcon. As a Principal Data Scientist within Digital Health Data Science, you will be trusted to lead high-impact data science initiatives and deliver AI-driven solutions that help transform the eye care industry. This role blends hands-on technical execution with technical leadership across Generative AI (LLMs), agentic workflows/AI agents, and classical machine learning. You will build and operationalize solutions in an AWS environment, leveraging services such as Amazon Bedrock, Amazon SageMaker, AWS Lambda, Amazon ECS/EKS, and Amazon Redshift, along with other AWS services as needed.

You will work in an agile environment, partnering with product managers, data engineers, software engineers, and business stakeholders to deliver scalable, reliable, and secure AI capabilities and applications.

Key Responsibilities (what you’ll do):

• Lead and execute end-to-end data science projects, ensuring timely delivery and measurable business impact.
• Design and deliver GenAI/LLM systems (e.g., RAG, summarization, classification, insight generation) and implement evaluation methods to ensure quality, safety, and reliability.
• Build agentic AI solutions (tool-using agents, multi-step workflows, orchestration patterns) that automate tasks and enhance decision-making using structured and unstructured data.
• Apply numerical optimization and classical ML techniques as needed (e.g., time series/forecasting, computer vision, NLP, anomaly detection, optimization) to support a broad portfolio of use cases.
• Collaborate with stakeholders to translate business needs into technical requirements, solution designs, and actionable outcomes.
•  Implement scalable architectures in AWS, including model development and deployment on Amazon SageMaker, LLM integrations via Amazon Bedrock, event-driven components using AWS Lambda, containerized services on ECS/EKS, and analytics/data access via Amazon Redshift.
• Contribute to MLOps/LLMOps practices such as CI/CD, model/version management, automated testing, monitoring, drift detection, and governance to support production-grade AI.
• Mentor and coach junior data scientists, promoting best practices in experimentation, modeling, engineering quality, and stakeholder communication.
• Evaluate emerging AI methods and tools, recommending practical approaches to improve solution effectiveness and organizational capability.

What You’ll Bring to Alcon (basic qualifications):

• Bachelor’s Degree or equivalent years of directly related experience (or high school + 15 yrs; Associate + 11 yrs; M.S. + 4 yrs; PhD + 3 yrs).
• Ability to fluently read, write, understand, and communicate in English.
• Significant relevant experience delivering applied ML/AI solutions in business settings.
• Strong programming skills in Python; experience with SQL and data processing at scale.

Preferred Skills and Experience:

• Strong foundation in a quantitative discipline (Data Science, Statistics, Computer Science, Engineering, or similar).
• Hands-on experience with GenAI/LLM application development, such as:
  – Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), embeddings, prompt engineering, tool/function calling
  – Evaluation frameworks (quality, hallucination mitigation, safety/guardrails)
• Knowledge/Experience building agentic systems (planning/execution loops, multi-agent coordination, workflow orchestration, tool integration).
• Experience with production ML systems and MLOps/LLMOps, including monitoring, observability, governance, and secure deployment.
• Practical experience in AWS.
• Strong collaboration skills with data engineering, software engineering, and product teams in an agile delivery model.
• Experience in healthcare, medical devices, or regulated environments is a plus.

How You Can Thrive at Alcon:

• See your career like never before with focused growth and development opportunities.
• Join Alcon’s mission to provide outstanding, innovative products and solutions to improve sight and improve lives.
• Alcon provides a robust benefits package including health, life, retirement, and paid time off, and more.

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Alcon is an Equal Opportunity Employer and takes pride in maintaining a diverse environment. We do not discriminate in recruitment, hiring, training, promotion or other employment practices for reasons of race, color, religion, gender, national origin, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, disability, or any other reason.

Experience Level

Senior Level