Valid8 Financial, Inc.
We’re looking for a Lead Data Scientist who can translate business challenges into intelligent models that scale. You will lead the design, development, and deployment of AI/ML models across a diverse range of applications—including predictive analytics, classification, semantic search, multi-modal processing (text, image, audio), and advanced LLM engineering. This role is critical in bridging domain understanding with deep technical modeling expertise, working closely with data engineers, AI software engineers, and product leaders.
We’re looking for a data science leader who is hands-on, strategic, and passionate about applying advanced machine learning—including LLMs and transformer architectures—to solve high-value, real-world problems at scale.
Who We Are
AbsenceSoft is elevating the leave and accommodations experienceand is looking to hire amazing people like you! We create user-friendly, secure, and compliant technology that empowers employers to bring humanity, certainty and efficiency to the leave and accommodationsexperience. Made by HR Professionals for HR Professionals, we're proud of where we've been and excited about where we're headed. We value creative, innovative people who are passionate about their work and who believe there is always a better way.
Leading With Our Core Values
Make a Difference.
We are inspired to make an impact through our hard work, talent and passion. We push ourselves each day to better serve our teams, our clients, and our community.
Team First.
We are driven by team spirit not by self-interest. We value collaboration and approach our work with humility and a desire to win together.
Own it.
If we say it, we mean it. We follow through on our commitments, step up to deliver, and grow from our successes and failures.
Everyone Matters.
No matter your background or experience, everyone's voice holds value here.
What You’ll Do
Lead the end-to-end lifecycle of ML models: scoping, data preparation, training, validation, deployment, and monitoring.
Design traditional supervised and unsupervised learning models as well as deep learning models for NLP, vision, and audio tasks.
Build, fine-tune, and evaluate large language models (LLMs), including MOE (Mixture of Experts), SLMs (Small Language Models), and other foundational architectures.
Engineer LLMs using transformer-based architectures, with expertise in tokenization, embedding layers, encoders, multi-head attention, and positional encoding.
Apply advanced techniques such as reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF), deep Q-learning, and parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT).
Collaborate with software engineers and AI product managers to operationalize models in scalable, production-grade environments.
Conduct exploratory data analysis and experimentation to uncover insights that drive product and business decisions.
Own the model evaluation framework and define metrics for performance, fairness, explainability, and robustness.
Apply Responsible AI principles to ensure models are ethically developed and comply with global regulations (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA, AI Act).
Partner with stakeholders to build AI features that serve compliance, leave, accommodations, and workforce intelligence domains.
Lead the scientific and strategic direction for the modeling roadmap and mentor junior data scientists as the team scales.
Participate in a highly compliant environment while assisting to maintain company controls and security within your job role.
Assist in maintaining applicable organizational security and compliance controls within your department, role, and subordinate’s roles.
Other duties as assigned.
What’ll Set You Up for Success Required Skills: 7+ years experience in data science, with a proven track record delivering enterprise-grade ML models. Extensive experience with transformer architectures and building LLMs from the ground up. Proficiency in tokenizers, embedding techniques, self-attention mechanisms, encoder-decoder models, and multi-head attention. Hands-on experience with reinforcement learning, deep Q-learning, RLHF, and PEFT approaches. Expert in Python and ML/DS libraries (pandas, NumPy, scikit-learn, XGBoost, LightGBM, TensorFlow, PyTorch). Experience developing models for NLP, computer vision, and/or audio using deep learning frameworks. Strong understanding of statistical modeling, experimental design, and model interpretability techniques. Experience collaborating with MLOps engineers to productionize models, monitor drift, and manage model lifecycle. Hands-on experience with large-scale data environments, feature engineering, and pipeline tooling (e.g., dbt, Airflow, Snowflake). Excellent communication skills with ability to convey technical findings to non-technical stakeholders. Working knowledge of global AI and data regulations and how they affect model development and deployment. Nice to Have Experiment Tracking: Weights & Biases, Comet Data Workflow Tools: dbt, Airflow, Snowflake, Prefect Semantic Search/Vector DBs: FAISS, Pinecone, Weaviate, txtai What To Know Before You Apply We’re located in beautiful Golden, Colorado. This is a full-time, salaried position + bonus. AbsenceSoft provides a wide variety of perks and benefits. Including full medical, dental, vision, and life insurance. We offer a 401k and 401k match after your first year with AbsenceSoft. We support your professional growth including industry training and CLMS Certification, opportunities for additional industry and technology certifications, and continuing education. The salary range for this position is $208k - $246k. At AbsenceSoft, we value an equitable and inclusive work environment and strive to build and foster diverse teams. Even if your work experience doesn’t align exactly with the position requirements, we'd still love to hear from you. You may just be the right candidate for this or other roles. We are committed to building a team that represents a variety of diverse backgrounds, perspectives, and skills. We are proud to be an equal opportunity workplace that celebrates and supports diversity and inclusion. Wemakeall employment and related decisions without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran status, disability status, age, or any other status protected by law. Apply for this job
First name Last name Email address Location Phone number Resume Attach resume Attach another file Attach file Are you authorized to work in the United States? Will you now or in the future require sponsorship for employment visa status (e.g. H-1B status)? How did you hear about us? If you selected Referral, please specify who: If you selected Event, please specify: If you selected Other, please specify: We invite you to complete the optional self-identification questions below used for compliance with government regulations and record-keeping guidelines. Any self-identification information provided will not be considered in the selection process. If you believe you belong to any of the categories of protected veterans listed below, please indicate by selecting the appropriate category(ies). The hiring employer is subject to the Vietnam Era Veterans' Readjustment Assistance Act of 1974, as amended by the Jobs for Veterans Act of 2002, 38 U.S.C. 4212 (VEVRAA) and requests this information in order to measure the effectiveness of the outreach and positive recruitment efforts it undertakes pursuant to VEVRAA. We are required by law to provide equal employment opportunity to qualified people with disabilities. We are also required to measure our progress toward having at least 7% of our workforce be individuals with disabilities. To do this, we must ask applicants and employees if they have a disability or have ever had a disability. Because a person may become disabled at any time, we ask all of our employees to update their information at least every five years.
Identifying yourself as an individual with a disability is voluntary, and we hope that you will choose to do so. Your answer will be maintained confidentially and not be seen by selecting officials or anyone else involved in making personnel decisions. Completing the form will not negatively impact you in any way, regardless of whether you have self-identified in the past. For more information about this form or the equal employment obligations of federal contractors under Section 503 of the Rehabilitation Act, visit the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) website at www.dol.gov/ofccp. Should be {http://www.linkedin.com/pub/[member-name/]x/y/z}or {http://www.linkedin.com/in/string}
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What’ll Set You Up for Success Required Skills: 7+ years experience in data science, with a proven track record delivering enterprise-grade ML models. Extensive experience with transformer architectures and building LLMs from the ground up. Proficiency in tokenizers, embedding techniques, self-attention mechanisms, encoder-decoder models, and multi-head attention. Hands-on experience with reinforcement learning, deep Q-learning, RLHF, and PEFT approaches. Expert in Python and ML/DS libraries (pandas, NumPy, scikit-learn, XGBoost, LightGBM, TensorFlow, PyTorch). Experience developing models for NLP, computer vision, and/or audio using deep learning frameworks. Strong understanding of statistical modeling, experimental design, and model interpretability techniques. Experience collaborating with MLOps engineers to productionize models, monitor drift, and manage model lifecycle. Hands-on experience with large-scale data environments, feature engineering, and pipeline tooling (e.g., dbt, Airflow, Snowflake). Excellent communication skills with ability to convey technical findings to non-technical stakeholders. Working knowledge of global AI and data regulations and how they affect model development and deployment. Nice to Have Experiment Tracking: Weights & Biases, Comet Data Workflow Tools: dbt, Airflow, Snowflake, Prefect Semantic Search/Vector DBs: FAISS, Pinecone, Weaviate, txtai What To Know Before You Apply We’re located in beautiful Golden, Colorado. This is a full-time, salaried position + bonus. AbsenceSoft provides a wide variety of perks and benefits. Including full medical, dental, vision, and life insurance. We offer a 401k and 401k match after your first year with AbsenceSoft. We support your professional growth including industry training and CLMS Certification, opportunities for additional industry and technology certifications, and continuing education. The salary range for this position is $208k - $246k. At AbsenceSoft, we value an equitable and inclusive work environment and strive to build and foster diverse teams. Even if your work experience doesn’t align exactly with the position requirements, we'd still love to hear from you. You may just be the right candidate for this or other roles. We are committed to building a team that represents a variety of diverse backgrounds, perspectives, and skills. We are proud to be an equal opportunity workplace that celebrates and supports diversity and inclusion. Wemakeall employment and related decisions without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran status, disability status, age, or any other status protected by law. Apply for this job
First name Last name Email address Location Phone number Resume Attach resume Attach another file Attach file Are you authorized to work in the United States? Will you now or in the future require sponsorship for employment visa status (e.g. H-1B status)? How did you hear about us? If you selected Referral, please specify who: If you selected Event, please specify: If you selected Other, please specify: We invite you to complete the optional self-identification questions below used for compliance with government regulations and record-keeping guidelines. Any self-identification information provided will not be considered in the selection process. If you believe you belong to any of the categories of protected veterans listed below, please indicate by selecting the appropriate category(ies). The hiring employer is subject to the Vietnam Era Veterans' Readjustment Assistance Act of 1974, as amended by the Jobs for Veterans Act of 2002, 38 U.S.C. 4212 (VEVRAA) and requests this information in order to measure the effectiveness of the outreach and positive recruitment efforts it undertakes pursuant to VEVRAA. We are required by law to provide equal employment opportunity to qualified people with disabilities. We are also required to measure our progress toward having at least 7% of our workforce be individuals with disabilities. To do this, we must ask applicants and employees if they have a disability or have ever had a disability. Because a person may become disabled at any time, we ask all of our employees to update their information at least every five years.
Identifying yourself as an individual with a disability is voluntary, and we hope that you will choose to do so. Your answer will be maintained confidentially and not be seen by selecting officials or anyone else involved in making personnel decisions. Completing the form will not negatively impact you in any way, regardless of whether you have self-identified in the past. For more information about this form or the equal employment obligations of federal contractors under Section 503 of the Rehabilitation Act, visit the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) website at www.dol.gov/ofccp. Should be {http://www.linkedin.com/pub/[member-name/]x/y/z}or {http://www.linkedin.com/in/string}
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