AVP, AI Modeling Platform

Job Description:

Role Title: AVP, AI Modeling Platform - L11
 

Company Overview: Synchrony (NYSE: SYF) is a premier consumer financial services company delivering one of the industry’s most complete digitally enabled product suites. Our experience, expertise and scale encompass a broad spectrum of industries including digital, health and wellness, retail, telecommunications, home, auto, outdoors, pet and more.

• We have recently been ranked #2 among India’s Best Companies to Work for by Great Place to Work. We were among the Top 50 India’s Best Workplaces in Building a Culture of Innovation by All by GPTW and Top 25 among Best Workplaces in BFSI by GPTW. We have also been recognized by AmbitionBox Employee Choice Awards among the Top 20 Mid-Sized Companies, ranked #3 among Top Rated Companies for Women, and Top-Rated Financial Services Companies.

• We provide best-in-class employee benefits and programs that cater to work-life integration and overall well-being.

• We provide career advancement and upskilling opportunities, for all to take up leadership roles.

Organizational Overview: Credit Team decisions credit actions across the lifecycle of a customer – from acquisition to account management to collections and recovery – we work towards managing credit and fraud losses and elevating customer experience through powerful and proprietary insights on customer risk and credit behaviours. The actionable insights are driven by access to numerous alternative data sources, new age technologies, focused strategies, emerging algorithms, and predictive precision. Spread across 10 pillars the credit team in India caters to the entire gamut of decision sciences, from data management to model development to strategy design, and bringing it all to life through technology, and managing within the guardrails of our regulatory requirements. As part of the team, you will have access to some unique product propositions, functional and leadership training, interaction with executive leadership team and a myriad of diverse perspectives.

Role Summary/Purpose:

The AVP – AI Modeling Platform (People Manager) role sits within the Credit organization. The incumbent will lead a team of 4+ members, delivering modeling and analytical solutions in partnership with Credit teams. In support of the One Synchrony culture, the role is also responsible for building and leveraging strong relationships across multiple functions within and beyond Credit to drive measurable impact for the SYF business.

Key Responsibilities:

• Own the vision, strategy, and multi-quarter roadmap for agentic AI solutions that improve bank decisioning outcomes (e.g., fraud/financial crime, credit decisioning, marketing next-best-action, collections, servicing).

• Lead the AI Modeling Platform (AMP) as a product by defining capabilities, prioritizing features, and ensuring reusable components (decision agents, tool use, orchestration, evaluation, monitoring) that accelerate delivery across lines of business.

• Translate business problems into measurable value cases (loss reduction, approval rate lift, fraud capture, cost-to-serve reduction, customer conversion lift) and track benefits realization.

• Establish standards for agent safety, governance, and controls appropriate for regulated banking use (human-in-the-loop, auditability, model/agent documentation, monitoring and escalation playbooks).

• Lead and grow a team of data scientists / ML engineers / decision scientists building agentic solutions end-to-end (prototype → production).

• Coach team members in agentic AI patterns (planning, tool-use, RAG, workflow orchestration, multi-agent collaboration), and in bank decision science fundamentals (risk, uplift modeling, scorecards, optimization, experimentation).

• Build a sustainable talent pipeline through hiring, onboarding, career development, and performance management; create an inclusive culture of high standards, continuous learning, and operational excellence.

• Drive end-to-end Agile delivery from discovery through scaling and lifecycle management, ensuring production-grade performance (reliability, latency, cost, security/privacy, resiliency, monitoring) and rigorous agent evaluation controls (test suites, red-teaming, guardrails, bias/fairness, drift, incident response).

• Drive enterprise partnership and scale by aligning cross-functional stakeholders (Fraud/FC, Credit Risk, Marketing, Collections/Servicing, Data/Engineering, Model Risk, Compliance/Legal, InfoSec, Ops) and cross-region teams (US/IAH) around the platform value proposition to enable adoption and reuse at scale.

• Stay ahead of agentic AI/LLMOps and regulatory/MRM trends and use that expertise to consult with stakeholders to identify high-impact decision opportunities, co-design solutions, align success metrics, secure resources, and convert best practices into actionable standards for AMP and delivery teams.

Required Skills/Knowledge:

• Bachelor’s or master’s degree in Statistics, Economics, Mathematics, or a related quantitative discipline, with 7+ years of hands-on analytics experience or 9+ years of relevant experience in lieu of a degree.

• Experience building and operationalizing agentic AI on AWS (AgentCore/Bedrock), including secure tool/data access, guardrails, and monitoring/evaluation.

• Proficiency with LangChain/LangGraph for RAG and agent orchestration (multi-step workflows, retries, human-in-the-loop).

• 7+ years of hands-on analytics experience using tools such as SQL, SAS, Python, Spark, Scala, and Hive, with demonstrated ability to apply advanced analytical techniques and efficiently work with complex, large-scale datasets.

• Proven experience managing a diverse, cross-functional team of analysts, data scientists, and data engineers across multiple technologies, including SQL, SAS, Python, D3.js/charting libraries, JavaScript, Java, Node.js, HTML, Spark, Scala, Hive, and MySQL.

• 4+ years of team and project management experience, with the ability to define and continuously improve best-in-class delivery models and adapt approaches quickly in an agile environment.

• Strong working knowledge of Agile methodologies (e.g., Scrum, Kanban) and proficiency with Atlassian tools such as JIRA and Confluence.

• Demonstrated ability to resolve complex technical and people-related challenges with minimal supervision.

• Ability to balance effective team leadership with hands-on contribution to critical project delivery.

Desired Characteristics:

• Familiarity with AI techniques and the ability to apply them effectively to business problems to drive measurable outcomes.

• Experience building scalable analytical assets (repeatable code, standardized metrics, dashboards) and monitoring.

• Superior thought leadership and framework based solutioning abilities.

• Experience in storytelling, presenting to senior leaders with strong communication skills.

• Innovative mindset that looks to improve current capabilities and discover new ones.

• Good working knowledge on graph database like Neo4j

• Strong written and verbal communication skills with the ability to synthesize complex analysis for senior audiences.

• Demonstrated project organization skills (workflow, timelines, dependencies) across multiple concurrent efforts.

Eligibility Criteria:

• Bachelor’s or master’s degree in Statistics, Economics, Mathematics, or a related quantitative discipline, with 7+ years of hands-on analytics experience (distance/online degrees not accepted); or 9+ years of relevant experience in lieu of a degree.

Work Timings: 2:00PM to 11:00PM

This role qualifies for Enhanced Flexibility offered in Synchrony India and will require the incumbent to be available between 06:00 AM Eastern Time – 11:30 AM Eastern Time (timings are anchored to US Eastern hours and will adjust twice a year locally). This window is for meetings with India and US teams. The remaining hours will be flexible for the employee to choose. Exceptions may apply periodically due to business needs) We are proud to offer flexibility at Synchrony. Our way of working allows you the option to work from home or workspaces in our Regional Engagement Hubs—Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Pune, Kolkata, or Delhi/NCR. Occasionally you may be required to commute or travel to Hyderabad or one of the Regional Engagement Hubs for in-person engagement activities such as business or team meetings, training, and culture events.

For Internal Applicants:

• Understand the criteria or mandatory skills required for the role, before applying

• Inform your manager and HRM before applying for any role on Workday

• Ensure that your professional profile is updated (fields such as education, prior experience, other skills) and it is mandatory to upload your updated resume (Word or PDF format)

• Must not be any corrective action plan (Formal/Final Formal)

• L9+ Employees who have completed 18 months in the organization and 12 months in current role and level are only eligible.

• Level 9+ Employees can apply.

Grade/Level: 11

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