MetLife

MetLife

Recognized on Fortune magazine's list of the 2024 "World's Most Admired Companies", Fortune World’s 25 Best Workplaces™ for 2024, as well as the 2024 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. With over 150 years of disciplined risk-management experience, MetLife provides deep expertise in skillfully navigating markets with the goal of delivering strong, risk-adjusted returns. The firm’s client-centric culture enables a singular focus on creating tailored solutions designed to help their clients meet their unique objectives – both today and moving forward in future.

MetLife is one of the largest institutional investors in the U.S. with $609.3 billion of total assets under management as of September 30, 2024. The company is ranked #60 on the Fortune 500 list for 2024. MetLife is committed to building a purpose-driven and inclusive culture that energizes their people. The company’s employees work every day to help build a more confident future for people around the world.

The Team

The position sits within the newly consolidated Data and Analytics (D&A) organization supporting the U.S. Business of MetLife. U.S. D&A assists all business lines of MetLife’s U.S. business (about 2/3 of MetLife Global by earnings) with everything related to data, analytics and data science, from data infrastructure, data governance, data engineering, data modeling, data analysis to business intelligence, data science and AI.

The Role

MetLife is seeking an experienced leader of Data Science for the Dental and Vision product within its Group Benefits business. Dental insurance is one of the largest product lines at MetLife and we are a top 3 provider of dental insurance in the U.S. You can be part of the team that plans to become the dominant dental insurer in the country. Reporting to the Head of Data Science for Dental and Vision insurance, this position will contribute to a variety of advanced analytics and data science solutions within our dental business.

Key Responsibilities

• Date science in Dental: Contributions to underwriting models, claims auto-adjudication logic and models, fraud waste and abuse analyses and models (mostly provider-related), dental network analyses, consumer analytics, network expansion analytics and much more.
• Leads and contributes to data analysis and modeling projects from project/sample design, business review meetings with internal and external clients deriving requirements/deliverables, reception and processing of data, performing analyses and modeling to final reports/presentations, communication of results and implementation support.
• Demonstrates to internal and external stakeholders how analytics can be implemented to maximize business benefits.  Provides technical support, which includes strategic consulting, needs assessments, project scoping and the preparation/presentation of analytical proposals.
• Utilizes advanced statistical techniques to create high-performing predictive models and creative analyses to address business objectives and client needs. Tests new statistical analysis methods, software and data sources for continual improvement of quantitative solutions.
• Utilizes data wrangling/data matching/ETL techniques while programming in several languages to explore a variety of data sources, gain data expertise, perform summary analyses and prepare modeling datasets. Deploys analytical solutions in production systems.
• Proactively and effectively communicates in various verbal and written formats with internal stakeholders on product design, data specification, model implementations, with partners on collaboration ideas and specifics, with clients and account teams on project/test results, opportunities, questions. Resolves problems and removes obstacles to timely and high-quality project completion.
• Create project milestone plans to ensure projects are completed on time and within budget. Provides high quality ongoing customer support, answering questions, resolving problems and building solutions.
• Communicate findings clearly and effectively through visualizations, dashboards, presentations, and technical reports tailored to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Develop and maintain scalable data pipelines and tools to support ongoing analysis and reporting needs. Monitor model performance and retrain/update models as needed to ensure accuracy over time.
• Follows industry trends in insurance and related data/analytics processes and businesses. Functions as the analytics expert in meetings with other internal areas and external vendors. Actively participates in proof-of-concept tests of new data, software and technologies. Shares knowledge within Analytics group.
• Assures compliance with regulatory and privacy requirements during design and implementation of modeling and analysis projects. Ensure ethical data usage and compliance with data privacy regulations and organizational policies.
• Stay up to date with the latest research and trends in data science, machine learning, and AI to continuously improve methodologies and tools.

Required Skills:

• Bachelor's degree with a concentration in a relevant field such as quantitative statistics, computer science, mathematics, economics, data science, quantitative psychology, or operations research.
• Overall, 3 years of experience in data science or relevant industry. 
• Strong verbal and written communications skills, listening and teamwork skills, and effective presentation skills. This is essential since you will have a lot of exposure to different internal groups.
• Substantial programming experience with Python, SPARK, SQL, and/or Hadoop. 
• Strong expertise in statistical modeling techniques. This can include linear regression, logistic regression, survival analysis, GLM, tree models (Random Forests and XGBoost as examples) and cluster analysis. 
• Recent Exposure to NLP with text data wrangling and Gen AI (examples include RAG and Agentic Agents).
• Experience with data visualization.
• Exposure or experience working with teams who deploy models in production.
• Exposure working in an Azure or AWS cloud environment for building and deploying models. 

Preferred Skills:

• Experience with advanced prompting, RAG, ontologies, Open AI, various other models, and agentic AI.
• Power BI is preferred for data visualization.
• Strong expertise in regularization techniques (examples include Ridge, Lasso, elastic nets etc.), and variable selection techniques. This includes feature creation (transformation, binning, high level categorical reduction, etc.) and validation (examples include test sets, CV, bootstrap etc.).
• Demonstrated experience with deploying ML models in production including building data pipelines. Kubernetes or Domino DataLab experience is a plus.
• Experience creating applications in Flask/Dash and other packages.
• Insurance experience is a plus. Experience with Azure is a plus.

Location

This position can be based at our Bridgewater, NJ office, Cary, NC office, or our corporate headquarters in NYC. We are currently on a hybrid schedule with 3 days per week in the office.

Travel Requirements

<10% required for stakeholder meetings, office location visits and industry conferences.