AVP, Data Science & AI

Role Title: AVP, Data Science & AI (L11)

Company Overview Synchrony (NYSE: SYF) is a leading consumer financing company that has been at the heart of American commerce and opportunity for nearly a century. Synchrony delivers credit and banking products that empower tens of millions of consumers to improve their financial lives and access what matters most. Leveraging innovative solutions that are shaping the future of retail commerce, Synchrony supports the growth and success of some of the nation’s most respected brands, alongside hundreds of thousands of small and midsize businesses, including health and wellness providers. Committed to excellence in service and culture, Synchrony is proud to be named as #3 as a Great Place to Work® in India and is honored to be ranked the #1 Best Company to Work For® in the U.S. by Fortune magazine and Great Place to Work®. For more information, visit www.synchrony.com.

Organizational Overview This role is part of enterprise-focused Data Science & AI team responsible for enabling and accelerating strategic AI bets across the organization. These bets focus on improving the efficiency of internal business processes and workflows, while strengthening foundational data and platform capabilities.

Role Summary/Purpose The AVP, Data Science & AI is a leadership role with people management responsibilities in the Data Science & AI team, part of Analytics in India , rolling up to Growth organisation. This role is responsible for enabling and evaluating strategic Generative AI and Agentic AI priorities across the organization and plays a critical leadership role in advancing foundational capability readiness.

The AVP will lead a team of data scientists and operate at the intersection of business strategy, AI solutions, data architecture and engineering, enterprise platforms, controls, and agile program execution. Key responsibilities include defining AI use-case requirements, evaluating feasibility and business value, and assessing readiness across data, platform, architecture, and control dimensions.

This role requires a blend of collaborative and transformational leadership, strong people management capabilities, and hands-on expertise in AI/ML prototyping, data evaluation, and capability assessment to help drive scalable, responsible, and impactful AI adoption across the organization.

Key Responsibilities Build

• Define prioritized AI use cases with clear business outcomes and measurable success metrics.
• Prototype GenAI solutions (workflow automation, RAG, MCP, agentic orchestration) and drive production-ready AI & ML solution designs and handoff.

Assess & Evaluate

• Lead end-to-end readiness assessments (architecture/semantic layer, platform/tooling, governance/controls, operational integration).
• Build and run an AI evaluation harness (golden datasets, automated metrics for quality/groundedness, safety, latency, cost) with benchmarking, regression tests, and release gates.

Data & Architecture

• Support technical, data, and integration requirements; guide scalable AI data architecture patterns
• Consult on semantic layer design, metadata strategy, and data integration/lineage standards.

Stakeholder/Cross functional Management

• Coordinate cross-functional delivery across business, enterprise AI program, engineering, data, and platform teams; align dependencies and milestones.
• Drive agile governance and executive reporting (backlog/Jira-Kanban hygiene, status/risk management, roadmap and leadership updates).

Required Skills & Knowledge

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, AI/Data Science, Engineering, Economics or such related fields with 6+ years of handson experience in delivering ML & AI solutions or 8+ years of relevant experience in lieu of a degree.
• Handson experience in delivering GenAI solutions involving workflow automations (Copilot/n8n/Zapier/Make), RAG, MCP, Agentic AI Orchestration (using Langchain/LangGraph/CrewAI/AutoGen/AWS Strands)
• Experience building and operationalizing agentic AI in AWS (AgentCore/Bedrock), Azure (OpenAI Service), or GCP (Vertex AI) including secure tool/data access, guardrails, and monitoring/evaluation.
• Experience using tools such as SQL, SAS/Python, Spark/Scala/Hive, with demonstrated ability to apply Machine Learning techniques and efficiently work with complex, large-scale datasets.
• Strong expertise in semantic layers, enterprise d…