Decision Scientist
Job Description
The Decision Scientist has a key role within the Experiential Product team and is responsible for developing decision models that support student experiences throughout the lifecycle. This role blends expertise in data science, behavioral/decision science, and data engineering to design, build, monitor, and continuously improve models within the decision intelligence system that trigger recommendations to students, staff, or faculty to drive actions that improve student success. The Decision Scientist collaborates closely with the decision intelligence product lead, technology lead, business SMEs, software and data engineering, ML Ops, and technology architects to build decision products that support personalized student progress and completion, drive automated solutions for operational efficiency and scale, and ensure that decisions are data-informed, equitable, and actionable.
Primary Responsibilities
- Designs and implements machine learning models that enable recursive learning and support key decision points across the student lifecycle.
- Deeply understands requirements, decision points, behavioral or process goals, and success criteria to translate them into model specifications.
- Ensures data inputs and outputs for decision models are structured, connected, and monitored appropriately.
- Partners with Data Engineering to develop data pipelines and operational workflows required to support decision models in production environments.
- Applies best practices in MLOps to monitor, retrain, and update models for sustained relevance and performance.
- Develops dashboards, visualizations, and communication tools that present model insights to non-technical audiences.
- Documents decision models, assumptions, data dependencies, and feedback loops to ensure transparency and reuse.
- Ensures models are interpretable and auditable to align with institutional goals of fairness and accountability.
- Identifies opportunities to apply advanced analytics, causal inference, and experimentation to improve student experiences.
- Performs other job-related duties as assigned.
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