The Sr Associate, Data Science  - AI Design,is a forward-thinking AI design specialist ready to transform how financial services harness the power of Snowflake Cortex and other AI solutions. In this role, you will design human-centered AI experiences that turn complex data and machine learning outputs into intuitive, trustworthy tools for customers, analysts, and decision-makers. You’ll work at the intersection of design, data, and AI, crafting solutions that drive financial innovation while ensuring clarity, transparency, and regulatory complianceas we transition to being a digital bank with branches.

About the job

Who We Are

The new AI Design team sits in the Data Science group within Retail Banking Transformation Analytics – we are focused on applying science (from fine-tuned linear models through to machine learning and AI) to our petabytes of data to uncover insights about our customers and their financial behaviors, assess risk and opportunities, drive scalable growth, surprise and delight our customers with bespoke experiences in branch and online, and improve the digital banking experience. 

We work with key business leaders and decision makers to refine and solve problems by mining, analyzing, and modeling data to provide insights that drive change. The day-to-day includes exploratory analysis to understand data structures and relationships, working closely with our business partners to build insight into new problems, research to refine a methodology, cranking out lightning-fast machine learning code to create a model that predicts trends and automates validation, collaborating with cross-functional teams, or visualizing and sharing their results with executives. Our work as innovators means that we are approaching new problems on novel (and potentially unstable) data and there is no playbook for best practice; instead, we rely on our understanding of applied statistics and incrementality, alongside industry knowledge of trends in customer channel behavior and a toolbox of machine learning approaches/algorithms to resolve the tension between complexity, scope, and explainability.

The ideal data scientist in our squad is comfortable working with a variety of partners (business verticals, IT, data engineering, risk...etc.) and data (structured, unstructured, streaming) in a shared code repository utilizing multiple programming languages and frameworks to deliver state-of-the-art frameworks, analytics and models in an agile environment. 

We are from a range of backgrounds - mathematicians, statisticians, economists, engineers, computer scientists, physicists, financiers, and of course data scientists – but we are all skilled in research methods, and are obsessed with our customers, financial projections, data science, research, AI, programming, clean and powerful data visualizations to communicate our ideas, and collaborating to find the best approach to emerging questions.

Who You Are

You:

• You are passionate about providing AI as a product. You design with quality, discoverability, and reusability in mind, anticipating evolving needs when architecting pipelines to create versioned, well-documented and accessible tools for a range of consumers.

• You are an AI-enabled collaborator and translator, bridging the gap between data, data science, and AI teams by proactively supporting model readiness, weaving together feature stores, embeddings, and RAG workflows to bridge the gap between raw model capabilities and practical, business-facing applications.

• You love automation, and strive to minimize manual intervention across ingestion, transformation, and deployment whilst being aware of the need to build in testing, alerts, and recovery mechanisms.

• You are able to explain your logical and structured thinking/processes in different ways to different people while maintaining the honesty and integrity of your work.

• You are endlessly curious, and data innovation demands your attention - you closely follow emerging patterns in RAG, data agents, and self-hosted LLM solutions. You love to share these learnings with your wider team.

• You are a customer-centered thinker who prioritizes transparency/explainability and designs with the end user in mind to create intuitive, accessible tools which solve real problems.

• You are an effective communicator with transparent artifacts (runbooks, Confluence/wiki pages, and lineage diagrams, commit messages and code comments) to document your work and can explain with clarity the trade-offs we need to make to technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• You are impact focused whilst being aware of your responsibility to design pipelines with fairness and inclusivity in mind to build trust and mitigate amplification of bias.

• You are mission driven, striving to connect your technical work with the broader purpose of the bank, working to help our people and businesses prosper.

• You thrive on being part of a fast-moving supportive team and welcome feedback to learn.

• You are comfortable with ambiguity and charting a path through quantitative analysis.

Examples of potential work

Early use cases include development of an LLM Reporting Assistant, an Agent Assist Chat Tool, and Banker ProcedureSupport Platform.

Role and Responsibilities

• Design Intelligent User Experiences by leading the design of interfaces and interaction patterns for AI-powered tools, such as those mentioned above. All the way from prototypes that validate usability in context to monitoringpost-launch.

• Champion consistency across squads, investing time in documenting AI design patterns for use across teams, while balancing with your own innovation.

• Collaborate closely with data scientists, ML engineers, and product managers to shape how models are presented and used by end users.

• Translate model capabilities and limitations into clear, safe, and explainable UI components.

• Advocate for ethical principles in AI feature development—fairness, bias mitigation, consent, and privacy.

• Design fail-safes, fallback UX, and transparency layers as part of your drive to build trust in AI.

• Analyze feedback and behavioral data to iterate on design solutions.

• Mentor Junior Team Members, including share best practices in AI interaction design and keep the team informed on emerging tools.

Technical Skills

• Advanced working understanding of AI/ML concepts, especially LLMs, NLP, and model explainability.

• Experience designing for complex systems (e.g., banking platforms, enterprise dashboards) weaving data from different sources.

• Strong communication and collaboration skills across design, product, and technical teams, where you will need to act as both advocate and gatekeeper

• Hands-on experience designing prompts for GPT-4, Claude, or Gemini and familiarity with Snowflake Cortex.

• Understanding of vector databases.

• Deep understanding of enterprise guardrails for hallucination detection, fallback, and escalation

• Passion for ethical AI, human-centered design, and user trust in automated systems.

• Ability to translate complex technical behaviors into clear, helpful user experiences.

• A growth mindset and a willingness to experiment and learn in a fast-evolving space.

• Comfort working in agile teams and participating in sprints or design reviews.

• Master’s degree in a quantitative area (Computer Science preferred) or a terminal degree in any field.

• 6 years of relevant professional (or research) experience 

At Santander, we value and respect differences in our workforce and strive to increase the diversity of our teams. We encourage everyone to apply.