Senior Data Scientist (Consultant)

Job Description STRATEGIC STAFFING SOLUTIONS (S3) HAS AN OPENING. Senior Data Scientist (Consultant) Detroit, MI (Hybrid/Onsite Tues-Thurs) W2 contract role 12 months with opportunity to extend Competitive salary with benefits Role Summary We are looking for a senior practitioner who has successfully built and deployed at least one production-grade Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) solution. The ideal candidate should be capable of working across the full AI lifecycle, including ingestion, retrieval, modeling, APIs, testing, deployment, monitoring, and operational support.

The candidate should also have strong expertise in classical machine learning and statistics and be experienced in delivering explainable, auditable AI solutions within regulated, human-in-the-loop environments. Additional details: Machine Learning & Applied AI Strong background in supervised and unsupervised learning, including: Classification Ranking Clustering Anomaly detection Predictive modeling Experience selecting evaluation metrics and designing representative test datasets Hands-on experience with explainability techniques such as SHAP, LIME, and feature importance analysis Experience designing human-in-the-loop AI systems with review, escalation, override, and feedback mechanisms Generative AI & Retrieval Production experience with: RAG architectures Embeddings Semantic search Re-ranking Prompt engineering Vector databases Experience building enterprise copilots, assistants, or document-grounded decision-support systems Ability to evaluate retrieval quality, grounding, hallucination risk, answer quality, and failure modes Experience with open-source or locally hosted LLMs preferred Python & Software Engineering Advanced Python skills, including: Pandas NumPy Scikit-learn PyTorch (or similar deep learning framework) Ability to develop maintainable, production-quality code rather than notebook-only solutions Experience with: Git and code reviews Unit and integration testing CI/CD pipelines API development Docker or Podman Experience with agentic development is a plus Comfortable working in both local and cloud environments Data Engineering & Integration Strong SQL and ETL/ELT development skills Experience integrating: REST APIs Enterprise document repositories Workflow systems Batch and incremental data pipelines Experience with PostgreSQL, SQL Server, data lake architectures, data lineage, and data quality controls Ability to design resilient ingestion pipelines for documents, metadata, attachments, and changing source-system records *Beware of scams. S3 never asks for money during its onboarding process.