Senior Manager, Applied Science

About Tekion:

Positively disrupting an industry that has not seen any innovation in over 50 years Tekion has challenged the paradigm with the first and fastest cloud-native automotive platform that includes the revolutionary Automotive Retail Cloud (ARC) for retailers Automotive Enterprise Cloud (AEC) for manufacturers and other large automotive enterprises and Automotive Partner Cloud (APC) for technology and industry partners. Tekion connects the entire spectrum of the automotive retail ecosystem through one seamless platform. The transformative platform uses cutting-edge technology big data machine learning and AI to seamlessly bring together OEMs retailers/dealers and consumers. With its highly configurable integration and greater customer engagement capabilities Tekion is enabling the best automotive retail experiences ever. Tekion employs close to 3000 people across North America Asia and Europe.

Job Description:

Tekion isseekinga passionate and dynamic Senior Manager of Applied Science to lead a team of appliedScientistsfocused on building next-generation AI applications on the cloud. You will work closely with product business machine learning engineering and customer success teams to align priorities timelines and deliverables. You will drive AI/ML development efforts and ensure customer engagements are supported with high-quality scalable solutions that deliver measurable impact.

Key Responsibilities:

Leadership and Team Management

• Lead mentor and manage a team of applied scientists including senior scientists and team leads.

• Build and scale a high-performing team of 5-8 scientists; provide regular mentoring andestablishclear career development paths.

• Set and promote best practices for research development code quality and technical excellence
  

Customer Engagement & Deliverable Management

• Collaborate with product and customer success teams to prioritize customer needs and align development timelines accordingly.

• Integrate customer feedback into development cycles adapting priorities as business needsevolve.

• Act as the technical point of contact for customer engagements setting clear expectations fordeliverables and timelines.

• Ensure high-quality on-time delivery of customer-facing AI/ML products that meet or exceedexpectations.
  

Product Development & Strategy

• Lead the execution of the R&D and product roadmap aligning ML initiatives with business goalsand customer priorities.

• Drive product strategy in collaboration with product management business development andoperations.

• Provide architectural and technical leadership on key projects ensuring robustnessscalabilityandflexibility.
  

Scalability & Best Practices

• Foster a high-performing team through agile workflows continuous improvement and strongdelivery processes.

• Architect and implement scalable AI/ML solutions aligned with ASDs long-term vision usingcloud-native technologies and microservices.

• Oversee the full MLlifecycle-includingdata collection model training validation deploymentand monitoring-ensuring effective team collaboration and resource management.

• Promote advanced techniques such as model compression quantization and distributedtraining.

• Champion industry best practices in development to ensure code quality performance andscalability.

• Stay current with advancements in ML and lead team engagement in the broader scientificcommunity.

• Collaborate with design product and engineering teams to deliver high-performance solutionsin a fast-evolving environment.
  

Required Qualifications

• Bachelors Masters or Ph.D. in Data Science Mathematics Operations Research Applied

• Mathematics Computational Science orrelated fields.

• Strong foundationin probability statistics and scientific problem-solving.

• 12 years of hands-on experience in analytics data science and deep learning in business-criticalenvironments.

• 3 years of experience managing teams of 5 or more preferably in applied science or cross-functionalsettings..

• Proventrack recordof delivering high-impact data-driven solutions to complex business problems.

• Proficient in machine learning deep learning and explainable AI techniques with the abilitytocommunicatetechnical conceptsto non-technical stakeholders.

• Experience developing and deployingstate-of-the-artML models tailored to specific business needs.

• Strong programming skills in Python and SQL; experience with feature engineering and deep learningpipelines.

• Familiarity with deep learning frameworks such as TensorFlowKeras andPyTorch.

• Experience with computer vision (e.g. OpenCV) and natural language processing ().

• Skilled in the Design of Experiments for scientific testing and optimization.

• Proficient in Git for version control and collaboration.

• Working knowledge of cloud platforms such as AWS GCP and Azure.

• Strong analytical thinking and structured problem-solving abilities.

• Excellent communication and collaboration skills in cross-functional teams.
  

Preferred Qualifications

• Demonstrated leadership experience in mentoring junior engineers and managing cross-functionalprojects.

• Proven innovationtrack recordsolutions thatdeliveredsignificant business impact or led to patents.

• Self-motivated proactive problem-solver with strong project ownership.

• Domain knowledge or experience in recommendation systems NLP or computer vision.

• Strong collaboration skills across multiple teams with an ability to manage conflict and alignpriorities.

Tekion is proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based upon race religion color national origin gender (including pregnancy childbirth or related medical conditions) sexual orientation gender identity gender expression age status as a protected veteran status as an individual with a disability victim of violence or having a family member who is a victim of violence the intersectionality of two or more protected categories or other applicable legally protected characteristics.

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