Pet Insurance Data Scientist

Description and Requirements
The Team You Will Join
The Pet Insurance Data & Analytics team sits within MetLife's Pet Insurance organization and partners closely with Claims, Operations, Product, and Technology to drive measurable business outcomes through data, analytics, and AI. We are responsible for building trusted reporting and "ground truth" measurement, developing production-grade models and automation, and continuously improving decision quality and operational efficiency. A major focus of the team is modernizing the claims adjudication lifecycle-using structured and unstructured data, advanced ML, and Generative AI to reduce cycle time, increase accuracy, and improve customer and clinician experience. Our work is highly applied, end-to-end, and directly connected to how MetLife serves customers every day.
The Opportunity
The Data Scientist (Pet Insurance AI Automation) is responsible for designing, building, validating, and deploying production-grade rule-based and machine learning solutions that automate and augment claims adjudication. This role is needed to accelerate MetLife Pet Insurance's automation roadmap by improving decisioning quality, throughput, and consistency across the claims lifecycle. This is an exciting opportunity to build real-world AI systems that combine ML, LLMs, and data engineering best practices, and to ship solutions that deliver immediate operational impact.
Success in this role requires strong execution, analytical problem-solving, and an engineering-minded approach to delivering production-ready AI. The Data Scientist (Pet Insurance AI Automation) is responsible for owning key automation capabilities end-to-end and partnering closely with Claims, Operations, and Technology stakeholders to translate complex problems into scalable solutions. You'll collaborate closely with product owners, claims leaders, engineers, data governance partners, and analytics peers in an environment where every contribution is respected, and every perspective is heard.
How You'll Help Us Build a Confident Future (Key Responsibilities)
• Lead the end-to-end development of AI-driven claims automation capabilities, from problem framing and experimentation through production deployment and monitoring.
• Create scalable pipelines and evaluation frameworks for "ground truth" generation, reporting, and continuous model measurement (accuracy, stability, and business impact).
• Oversee model validation, performance monitoring, and iterative improvements, ensuring solutions remain accurate, reliable, and aligned with operational needs.
• Manage the full ML lifecycle for structured and unstructured data use cases, including feature engineering, training, testing, deployment, and ongoing optimization.
• Develop LLM-enabled capabilities (prompt engineering, fine-tuning where appropriate, and robust evaluation) to support document understanding, decision support, and workflow automation.
• Coordinate cross-functional delivery with Claims, Operations, Technology, and D&A partners (Data Governance, Data Quality, Data Architecture, DevOps, BI/Insights) to ensure compliance, secure, and production-ready outcomes.
Required Skills:

• 5 - 8+ years of relevant experience.
• Bachelor's degree in computer science, Information Technology, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience, with a track record of delivering production-grade analytics/ML solutions.
• Python proficiency.
• Advanced SQL expertise to generate trusted reporting/ground truth datasets, perform deep analysis, and validate model outcomes.
• Experience with Generative AI / LLMs, including prompt engineering and familiarity with fine-tuning and evaluation approaches.
• Cloud and MLOps experience on Azure/AWS/GCP especially CI/CD pipelines and operational observability (e.g., Log Analytics), with strong production mindset.
• Strong analytical and structured problem-solving skills, with the ability to independently solution, troubleshoot, and drive to outcomes.
• Clear communication and stakeholder partnership skills, able to translate between technical details and business impact with confidence.

Preferred Skills:

• Machine learning development experience across the lifecycle (EDA, feature engineering, modeling, evaluation, monitoring), using common frameworks (e.g., scikit-learn; TensorFlow or PyTorch as applicable).
• ML Ops experience (model registry, deployment patterns, monitoring/alerting, retraining strategies, governance workflows) in Azure or comparable cloud services.
• Ability to work effectively in large codebases to build, test, and deploy ML/AI solutions.
• Experience with OCR and document understanding tools, and/or NLP libraries (e.g., spaCy, Transformers) applied to real-world text extraction and classification.
• Power BI and/or data engineering knowledge to support scalable reporting, metric design, and operational dashboards.
• Mentorship and technical leadership experience (particularly relevant for Grade 11), including leading solution design, estimations, and guiding other data scientists.
• Insurance, financial services, or regulated-domain experience, including comfort operating within quality, security, compliance, explainability, and responsible AI guidelines.

Location Expectation: This is a hybrid role requiring a minimum of 3 days per week in office.
The expected salary range for this position is $103,300 - $154,975. This role may also be eligible for annual short-term incentive compensation. All incentives and benefits are subject to the applicable plan terms.
Benefits We Offer
Our U.S. benefits address holistic well-being with programs for physical and mental health, financial wellness, and support for families. We offer a comprehensive health plan that includes medical/prescription drug and vision, dental insurance, and no-cost short- and long-term disability. We also provide company-paid life insurance and legal services, a retirement pension funded entirely by MetLife and 401(k) with employer matching, group discounts on voluntary insurance products including auto and home, pet, critical illness, hospital indemnity, and accident insurance, as well as Employee Assistance Program (EAP) and digital mental health programs, parental leave, volunteer time off, tuition assistance and much more!
About MetLife
Recognized on Fortune magazine's list of the "World's Most Admired Companies", Fortune World's 25 Best Workplaces™, as well as the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For®, MetLife, through its subsidiaries and affiliates, is one of the world's leading financial services companies; providing insurance, annuities, employee benefits and asset management to individual and institutional customers. With operations in more than 40 markets, we hold leading positions in the United States, Latin America, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.
Our purpose is simple - to help our colleagues, customers, communities, and the world at large create a more confident future. United by purpose and guided by our core values - Win Together, Do the Right Thing, Deliver Impact Over Activity, and Think Ahead - we're inspired to transform the next century in financial services. At MetLife, it's #AllTogetherPossible . Join us!
MetLife is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All employment decisions are made without regards to race, color, national origin, religion, creed, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, disability, marital or domestic/civil partnership status, genetic information, citizenship status (although applicants and employees must be legally authorized to work in the United States), uniformed service member or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local law ("protected characteristics").
If you need an accommodation due to a disability, please email us at [email protected]. This information will be held in confidence and used only to determine an appropriate accommodation for the application process.
MetLife maintains a drug-free workplace.
$103,300 - $154,975
#BI-Hybrid