Principal Data Scientist

Volkswagen Financial Services, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Volkswagen Group, is the trusted key to mobility for its brand partners. We are committed to supporting the Audi, Ducati, and Volkswagen brands and their Dealers, specializing in providing accessible mobility solutions for its Customers. The company’s offerings include Retail Leasing, Retail Financing, Commercial Financing for new and used vehicles, and End-of-Term vehicle disposition.

Brief Role Description

This position is Career Level 30P located in Reston, VA with a Role Classification of Hybrid.

Role Summary

The role resides within VWFS’s Data Science & AI CoE team and is a key player in providing analytical insights, models, and analytical direction to shape the future strategy of VWFS’s Mobility transformation.

The Principal Data Scientist will lead high-impact initiatives that directly contribute to VWFS’s stated goal to become a data and AI-driven organization. Potential projects cover the entire spectrum of automotive finance, from automated decision-making to fraud detection and business process improvement.

Responsibilities within this Role

• Lead data science product development, set standards, best practices, and innovation for the data science CoE (25%)
• Experimentation, build, integration of data science solutions into core business processes and new opportunities (75%)
• Definition and ongoing improvement of a machine learning environment
• Develop and deploy AI models that impact business decisions
• Establish best practices and governance routines to ensure adherence to model management policies, peer reviews, and compliance to our policy standards for privacy, ethics, and bias.
• Bring relevant data science techniques, algorithms, and tools to your team
• Provide technical oversight, help and mentorship to the junior data scientists on the team
• Apply suitable techniques for model testing and tuning, to assess accuracy, fit, validity, and robustness
• Innovate new ML methods in the data science space and drive change throughout the business
• Contributes to code documentation, maintains playbooks, and provides timely progress updates
• Help generate compelling hypotheses to drive new business creation

Qualification requirements

Required Education:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Statistics, Economics, Engineering, Operations Research or similar quantitative field
• Master’s degree in Computer Science, Statistics, Economics, Engineering, Operations Research or similar quantitative field

Required Experience:

• 12+ years of data & analytics work experience with 8+ years in data science
• 7+ years in utilizing methods and tools to extract, curate, explore, and analyze data from large data sources
• 7+ years in developing, integrating and deploying machine learning solutions into the business decision making process
• 7+ years in leveraging algorithms, tune parameters and back testing validation
• 5+ years leading ML project development

Skills:

• Collaborate with product owners and product managers to translate business requirements into impactful AI solutions that scale
• Build, integrate and deploy machine learning solutions into the business decision-making process
• Thorough knowledge of machine learning models, including both traditional ML and GenAI
• Utilize a consultative approach to work with the business to solve challenging problems using various analytical techniques
• Embrace, research, explore, and enable new quantitative techniques and technologies in data science that will help define VWFS as an industry leader in the application of data science techniques
• Extensive experience with model evaluation and solid grasp of A/B testing and causal analysis
• Research new data sources and analytical tools, contribute to new application development, and data quality improvement efforts
• Ability to originate curiosity to collaborate with different business units to co-create solutions
• Passion for data analysis and problem solving
• Establishes and maintains effective performance tracking; identifies improvement opportunity, form hypothesis, propose, design and implement tests to drive strategy enhancement and optimization.
• Superior ability to communicate technical ideas and results to non-technical users in written and verbal form

Volkswagen Financial Services is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We welcome and encourage applicants from all backgrounds, and do not discriminate based on race, sex, age, disability, sexual orientation, national origin, religion, color, gender identity/expression, marital status, veteran status, or any other characteristics protected by applicable laws.

This role description is a guideline and does not create contractual rights between the Company and any of its applicants. The Company does not enter into any type of employment contract, implied or written, with its applicants regarding job security.

This Organization participates in E-Verify. We maintain a drug free workplace and perform pre-employment substance abuse testing.

Job ID: 20175

Company: VW Credit, Inc.

Location: Reston, VA, US, 20190

Department: IT and Digitalization

Working Model: Full-time

Contract Type: Other

Remote Working: According to company policy

Posting Date: Jan 7, 2026

We are the key to mobility - become a part of this exciting journey now!

Discover a variety of tasks and new challenges. Together we will implement exciting projects and reshape the future of mobility.

In case of further inquiry please provide the Job-ID as reference number.