Principal Data & AI Consultant

Endava · Remote, , United States

  • Senior
  • Full-time
  • Posted 2026-09-17
  • Confirmed live on 25 September 2026

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Job description

Job Description
• Serve as a senior trusted advisor to CIO, CTO, CDO, CRO, business, product, and technology stakeholders.

• Lead Data & AI discovery and translate ambiguous business problems into measurable, production-ready solutions.

• Design end-to-end architectures spanning data platforms, analytics, machine learning, GenAI, applications, APIs, governance, and integrations.

• Lead and challenge advanced forecasting and predictive-modeling approaches, including regression, sparse and zero-inflated data, feature design, model selection, tuning, and validation.

• Define appropriate business and model success measures, including R², WAPE, MAPE, statistical significance, and business-impact KPIs.

• Ensure point-in-time correctness, prevent data leakage, and maintain rigorous model-development and validation practices.

• Provide hands-on technical leadership using Python, SQL, Snowflake, notebooks, Git, and modern Data/AI platforms.

• Shape AI use cases across forecasting, sponsorship sales, lead scoring, next-best-action, revenue intelligence, personalization, subscription growth, and commercial optimization.

• Evaluate when classical analytics/ML, GenAI, or agentic AI is the appropriate solution.

• Lead architecture and solution-design workshops and present recommendations to senior and executive audiences.

• Support proposals, SOWs, RFI/RFP responses, estimates, staffing models, and technical solution shaping.

• Lead and mentor multidisciplinary teams across Data Science, Data Engineering, AI Engineering, Software Engineering, and Architecture.

• Actively participate in client stand-ups, backlog refinement, executive readouts, and strategic planning.

• Teach and transfer knowledge to client teams; documentation, reproducibility, and handover are expected parts of delivery.

• Challenge client requests when the proposed approach does not solve the underlying business problem.

Qualifications
Required:

• 7+ years of applied forecasting and data domain experience.

• Proven experience leading at least two comparable forecasting engagements from discovery through production/handover.

• Strong experience with comparable-unit / same-store-style forecasting approaches.

• Expert-level multivariable regression, collinearity analysis, VIF interpretation, model tuning, selection, and holdout validation.

• Strong understanding of sparse and zero-inflated datasets; must understand why nulls cannot be silently treated as zero.

• Strong metric fluency, including R², WAPE, MAPE, and p-values, with the ability to explain metric selection in business language.

• Deep understanding of data leakage and point-in-time feature correctness.

• Strong Python and SQL skills and experience creating reproducible analytical workflows/notebooks.

• Git and pull-request-based software delivery experience.

• Strong Data Architecture and Solution Architecture capability across ingestion, transformation, modeling, security, governance, APIs, cloud, and production operations.

• Strong understanding of ML, GenAI/LLMs, RAG, AI agents, and modern enterprise AI patterns.

• Proven executive communication skills; must be able to present to non-statistical audiences using business outcomes first and methodology second.

• Must be capable of explicitly communicating forecast/model limitations, uncertainty, and risk in plain language.

• Proven client consulting and thought-leadership experience; able to teach methodology, not simply execute it.

• Demonstrated experience leading senior client workshops, technical discovery, architecture discussions, and executive readouts.

• Strong commercial judgment and ability to connect technical decisions to revenue, operational, or customer outcomes.

• Preferred domain experience in sports, media, entertainment, streaming, ticketing, subscriptions, sponsorship, advertising, telecom, or commercial/revenue analytics.
Desired:

• Hierarchical/mixed-effects modeling, ADRs, large-scale categorical encoding, MLOps, governance, and responsible AI experience.

• Strong Snowflake experience; Snowflake ML / Model Registry experience.

• 10–12+ years overall Data, Analytics, AI, Architecture, or related technology experience.

Additional Information
All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.

Additional Employee Requirements

• Participation in both internal meetings and external meetings via video calls, as necessary.

• Ability to go into corporate or client offices to work onsite, as necessary.

• Prolonged periods of remaining stationary at a desk and working on a computer, as necessary.

• Ability to bend, kneel, crouch, and reach overhead, as necessary.

• Hand-eye coordination necessary to operate computers and various pieces of office equipment, as necessary.

• Vision abilities including close vision, toleration of fluorescent lighting, and adjusting focus, as necessary.

• For positions that require business travel and/or event attendance, abilit

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