[Remote] Senior Director Decision Science

Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Empower is dedicated to transforming financial lives through a flexible work environment and a focus on well-being. The Senior Director Decision Science will lead the strategy and execution of enterprise-level decisioning systems, ensuring that predictive insights translate into effective decision policies across various channels. This role involves overseeing the decision engine's architecture, governance, and performance while collaborating with cross-functional teams to drive business outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Define and own the enterprise decisioning charter, objectives, operating model, guardrails, and KPI trees aligned to strategic business outcomes, including prospect and existing client fatigue, fairness, and privacy
• Establish and govern the enterprise roadmap for the decision engine, including prioritization of next-best-action and lead-routing initiatives in partnership with Sales, Marketing, Product, Technology, and Client Services
• Balance delivery commitments, technical constraints, and strategic trade-offs while communicating timing, dependencies, and risks to executive stakeholders
• Maintain end-to-end accountability for the architecture, build, performance, governance, and lifecycle management of a real-time decision engine powering next-best-action decisions and decision sequences at scale
• Direct teams responsible for translating enterprise goals, such as sales growth, engagement, and retention, into eligibility schemas, fatigue and frequency limits, fairness constraints, reward functions, and constrained optimization approaches
• Oversee the design and deployment of decision policies, optimization frameworks, and sequencing logic that deliver the best action or action sequence for each prospect or existing client
• Establish standards for experimentation, rollout, and risk management, incorporating canaries, bandit approaches, A/B testing, and statistically sound ship, iterate, and stop decisions
• Partner with personalization, experimentation, and analytics leaders to co-own experimentation strategy, learning agendas, and measurement frameworks
• Lead cross-functional technology delivery by setting requirements and direction for real-time decision APIs, integrations, rules engines, data models, and logging frameworks
• Ensure enterprise standards for versioning, audit trails, rollback and disaster recovery plans, incident response, and service-level agreements
• Maintain canonical decision metrics, fairness and eligibility checks, transparent decision logs, and audit-ready documentation to support reporting, regulatory review, and internal governance
• Build, lead, and develop a team of Decision Science and Technical Product Management leaders; set expectations, coach performance, and grow enterprise decisioning capabilities

Skills

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Business, or a related field
• 9+ years of experience in decision science, applied data science, optimization, or equivalent fields
• 3+ years of experience leading managers or senior practitioners in a people management capacity
• Proven leadership in the design, delivery, and governance of enterprise-scale, real-time decisioning and decision policy systems
• Deep expertise in optimization and experimentation techniques, including uplift modeling, bandits, experimental design, generalized linear models, allocation models, and related approaches
• Strong proficiency in SQL and Python, with the ability to guide technical standards and review work at scale
• Experience directing teams that build or integrate real-time, API-driven decisioning platforms
• Strong business and financial acumen, with demonstrated executive communication skills and the ability to influence senior leaders
• Strategic thinking skills, with the ability to balance near-term delivery with long-term platform and capability vision
• Demonstrated success shipping and operating decision or rules engines in production, including integration with feature stores and model registries
• Experience overseeing experimental design and measurement practices across teams
• Strong intuition for end-customer needs and behaviors, and the ability to translate insights into scalable decision strategies
• Demonstrated ability to navigate complex, matrixed organizations to drive enterprise priorities
• Working curiosity and applied understanding of emerging artificial intelligence capabilities and their impact on decisioning, optimization, and governance
• MBA or advanced degree

Benefits

• Medical, dental, vision and life insurance
• Retirement savings – 401(k) plan with generous company matching contributions (up to 6%), financial advisory services, potential company discretionary contribution, and a broad investment lineup
• Tuition reimbursement up to $5,250/year
• Business-casual environment that includes the option to wear jeans
• Generous paid time off upon hire – including a paid time off program plus ten paid company holidays and three floating holidays each calendar year
• Paid volunteer time — 16 hours per calendar year
• Leave of absence programs – including paid parental leave, paid short- and long-term disability, and Family and Medical Leave (FMLA)
• Business Resource Groups (BRGs) – BRGs facilitate inclusion and collaboration across our business internally and throughout the communities where we live, work and play. BRGs are open to all.
• Other necessary computer equipment, will be provided.

Company Overview