Lead Data Scientist
Norfolk Southern
Lead Data Scientist
Norfolk Southern
Rail freight transportation across eastern U.S.
Requisition 40303: B5 Lead Generative AI Data Scientist
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Norfolk Southern offers a unique opportunity to be part of our proud legacy that spans nearly 200 years. We are a customer-centric, operations-driven team dedicated to advancing safety, serving communities, and driving innovation for tomorrow's rail. As part of Norfolk Southern, you’ll join a collaborative team where there are opportunities for growth across the organization. We are building a culture where everyone can thrive by owning and driving exceptional results, being humble and leading with trust, serving our customers with excellence, and collaborating and coaching to win.
Who we are and what we do:
Norfolk Southern Corporation is seeking a Lead Data Scientist (GenAI) to join our enterprise AI team. This role focuses on developing, optimizing, and enhancing intelligent solutions using Generative AI technologies, including Large Language Models (LLMs), Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers. The ideal candidate will partner with technical and business leaders across the enterprise to deliver scalable, secure, and high-performing AI capabilities that drive business value. The position involves working with cloud-based platforms, modern AI/ML frameworks, and collaborating across business units to solve complex problems.
What kind of problems do we solve:
• Document Intelligence: Analyze and extract insights from thousands of corporate documents, reports, and operational data using advanced NLP techniques.
• Conversational AI: Build intelligent chat systems that help employees retrieve information and interact with enterprise data.
• GenAI Solutions: Creating and deploying Generative AI models for document processing, visual data analysis, and natural language understanding.
• Model Context Protocol (MCP): Enhance AI agent capabilities through custom tool integrations and context-aware servers.
• Lead design and architecture of enterprise GenAI solutions tailored to business use cases.
• Design modular, framework‑agnostic LLM pipelines using libraries such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, or similar
• Define prompting strategies, agent patterns, and RAG architectures. Ensure approaches are scalable, reusable company‑wide and drive adoption across teams.
• Oversee lifecycle of usecases, development to deployment to production and MLops.
• Ensure responsible AI practices, including explain ability, governance, and compliance.
• Evaluate emerging AI trends and help guide the adoption of high value innovations.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to understand business needs and deliver configurable, scalable solutions.
• Bachelor’s required in computer science, data science, machine learning, NLP, AI, linguistics, or related field required. Masters or PhD is preferred.
Skills Required:
• 5+ years of experience in GenAI, Data Science, Machine Learning, or NLP positions.
• Extensive background in building, finetuning and operationalizing large language models (LLMs) in production environment.
• Proficiency in Python, including libraries such as Scikit-learn, PyTorch, Pandas, NumPy, spaCy, NLTK, and Matplotlib.
• Skilled in SQL, NoSQL, Milvus, Pinecone, PGVector databases
Skills Preferred:
• Advanced degree, e.g., Ph.D. or M.S. computer science, data science, machine learning, NLP, AI, linguistics, or related field preferred.
• Highly experienced in creating Agentic LLMs and knowledge of orchestration frameworks such as LangGraph.
• NLP and AI/ML Frameworks: Experience with training NLP models from scratch, working with Large Language Models, and using libraries such as Pytorch, and Transformers.
• Highly experienced with cloud platforms, preferably AWS (ECS, S3, Lambda, Bedrock, OpenSearch), Databricks, and Datadog.
• DevOps knowledge: Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD, Git, Terraform.
Work Conditions
Environment: Hybrid 2 days on-site and remote work 3 days per week.
Shift Work: No
On-Call: No
Weekend Work: No
Company Overview
Since 1827, Norfolk Southern Corporation (NYSE: NSC) and its predecessor companies have safely moved the goods and materials that drive the U.S. economy. Today, it operates a customer-centric and operations-driven freight transportation network. Committed to furthering sustainability, Norfolk Southern helps its customers avoid 15 million tons of yearly carbon emissions by shipping via rail. Its dedicated team members deliver more than 7 million carloads annually, from agriculture to consumer goods, and is the largest rail shipper of auto products and metals in North America. Norfolk Southern also has the most extensive intermodal network in the eastern U.S., serving a majority of the country’s population and manufacturing base, with connections to every major container port on the Atlantic coast as well as the Gulf of Mexico and Great Lakes. Learn more by visiting www.NorfolkSouthern.com.
At Norfolk Southern, we believe in celebrating our individuality. By leveraging the unique backgrounds and viewpoints of our employees, we can create a culture of innovation, respect, and inclusion. We know that employees thrive in a workplace where differing viewpoints, ideas, and experiences are freely shared and valued. As such, we encourage all employees to contribute their distinctive skills and capabilities to our organization.
Equal employment opportunities are available to all applicants regardless of race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetic information, veteran status, sexual orientation, and gender identity. Together, we power progress.
Rail freight transportation across eastern U.S.
Norfolk Southern moves freight by rail across about 19,500 miles of track in 22 eastern states and the District of Columbia, carrying coal, automotive products, and other goods for manufacturers, energy producers, and retailers. Its service works by operating trains that connect eastern container ports and link with other rail carriers to enable intermodal shipments, charging customers based on haul distance, weight, commodity type, and demand. Compared with competitors, NS differentiates itself with a large eastern network, direct port access, and strong connections to other carriers, along with a diverse customer base concentrated in coal, automotive, and industrial shipments. Its goal is to provide reliable, efficient freight transportation and logistics that support customers' supply chains.
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