Senior Director Decision Science

Responsibilities

• Define and own the enterprise decisioning charter, objectives, operating model, guardrails, and KPI trees aligned to strategic business outcomes, including prospect and existing client fatigue, fairness, and privacy.
• Establish and govern the enterprise roadmap for the decision engine, including prioritization of next-best-action and lead-routing initiatives in partnership with Sales, Marketing, Product, Technology, and Client Services.
• Balance delivery commitments, technical constraints, and strategic trade-offs while communicating timing, dependencies, and risks to executive stakeholders.
• Maintain end-to-end accountability for the architecture, build, performance, governance, and lifecycle management of a real-time decision engine powering next-best-action decisions and decision sequences at scale.
• Direct teams responsible for translating enterprise goals, such as sales growth, engagement, and retention, into eligibility schemas, fatigue and frequency limits, fairness constraints, reward functions, and constrained optimization approaches.
• Oversee the design and deployment of decision policies, optimization frameworks, and sequencing logic that deliver the best action or action sequence for each prospect or existing client.
• Establish standards for experimentation, rollout, and risk management, incorporating canaries, bandit approaches, A/B testing, and statistically sound ship, iterate, and stop decisions.
• Partner with personalization, experimentation, and analytics leaders to co-own experimentation strategy, learning agendas, and measurement frameworks.
• Lead cross-functional technology delivery by setting requirements and direction for real-time decision APIs, integrations, rules engines, data models, and logging frameworks.
• Ensure enterprise standards for versioning, audit trails, rollback and disaster recovery plans, incident response, and service-level agreements.
• Maintain canonical decision metrics, fairness and eligibility checks, transparent decision logs, and audit-ready documentation to support reporting, regulatory review, and internal governance.
• Build, lead, and develop a team of Decision Science and Technical Product Management leaders; set expectations, coach performance, and grow enterprise decisioning capabilities.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Business, or a related field.
• 9+ years of experience in decision science, applied data science, optimization, or equivalent fields.
• 3+ years of experience leading managers or senior practitioners in a people management capacity.
• Proven leadership in the design, delivery, and governance of enterprise-scale, real-time decisioning and decision policy systems.
• Deep expertise in optimization and experimentation techniques, including uplift modeling, bandits, experimental design, generalized linear models, allocation models, and related approaches.
• Strong proficiency in SQL and Python, with the ability to guide technical standards and review work at scale.
• Experience directing teams that build or integrate real-time, API-driven decisioning platforms.
• Strong business and financial acumen, with demonstrated executive communication skills and the ability to influence senior leaders.
• Strategic thinking skills, with the ability to balance near-term delivery with long-term platform and capability vision.
• Demonstrated success shipping and operating decision or rules engines in production, including integration with feature stores and model reg

Benefits

Additional Information

Our vision for the future is based on the idea that transforming financial lives starts by giving our people the freedom to transform their own. We have a flexible work environment, and fluid career paths. We not only encourage but celebrate internal mobility. We also recognize the importance of purpose, well-being, and work-life balance. Within Empower and our communities, we work hard to create a welcoming and inclusive environment, and our associates dedicate thousands of hours to volunteering for causes that matter most to them. Chart your own path and grow your career while helping more customers achieve financial freedom. Empower Yourself. ***Applicants must be authorized to work for any employer in the U.S. We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment visa at this time, including CPT/OPT.*** The Senior Director Decision Science will provide enterprise-level leadership for real-time decisioning and next-best-action systems that translate predictive insights into governed, auditable decision policies. This role owns the strategy, execution, and measurable business impact of next-best-action decisions and decision sequences delivered across omni-channel touchpoints through integrated systems and APIs, including lead routing to Sales and Service. The Senior Director Decision Science will lead the end-to-end roadmap, design, implementation, and ongoing operation of the enterprise decision engine serving all prospects and existing clients.

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