# Lead Data Scientist – Underwriting

**Company**: Manulife Financial Corporation
**Work arrangement**: hybrid
**Experience**: senior
**Job type**: full-time
**Category**: IT
**Industry**: Finance

**Apply**: https://manulife.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/MFCJH_Jobs/job/Hong-Kong/Lead-Data-Scientist---Underwriting-AI_JR26030867-1?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply
**Canonical**: https://yubhub.co/jobs/job_9a5ff4eb-cc5

## Description

The Lead Data Scientist – Underwriting is a senior leadership role responsible for driving regional and BU-level AI, ML, and Generative AI solutions to transform underwriting decision-making across Asia.

You will lead and grow a team of data scientists focused on underwriting AI, while also acting as a hands-on technical leader shaping advanced predictive, prescriptive, and generative solutions.

**Technical & Business Leadership**

- Lead the design, development, and deployment of AI, ML, and Generative AI solutions supporting underwriting use cases, including underwriting summarization and document intelligence, risk assessment and decision support, straight-through processing (STP) and workflow automation, and data-driven underwriting rules optimization.

- Translate complex underwriting and business problems into scalable analytical and GenAI solutions with measurable business outcomes.

- Drive adoption of AI solutions by embedding them into end-to-end underwriting workflows, ensuring usability, governance, and regulatory compliance.

- Partner with reinsurers, vendors, and external technology providers to co-develop or integrate advanced underwriting solutions.

- Lead, coach, and develop a high-performing team of data scientists focused on underwriting AI and analytics.

**Generative AI & Advanced Analytics**

- Lead the application of AI and especially GenAI in underwriting, including Large Language Models (LLMs) for text-heavy underwriting data, prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and evaluation frameworks.

- Ensure AI solutions are responsible, explainable, auditable, and compliant with internal AI governance and regulatory expectations.

- Establish standards for model lifecycle management, performance monitoring, and value tracking for AI and GenAI solutions.

**Strategy, Governance & Stakeholder Management**

- Contribute to AI and data strategy, focusing on data optimization, monetization, and external data enrichment.

- Collaborate with global and regional teams to define common modeling standards, governance, and reusable AI assets, aligned with AI CoE guidelines.

- Maintain a regional/global model repository to track models in use, performance, and risks.

- Act as a trusted advisor to underwriting and business leaders, influencing prioritization and investment decisions.

- Proactively identify risks, data challenges, and stakeholder conflicts, and drive alignment and mitigation plans.

**Required Qualifications:**

- 10+ years of experience in AI, machine learning, or advanced analytics, preferably within financial services.

- Strong underwriting, insurance, or reinsurance domain knowledge (highly preferred).

- Proven experience leading complex analytics initiatives in highly regulated environments.

**Technical & GenAI Skills**

- Strong hands-on expertise in ML/statistical modeling, segmentation, and underwriting or claims analytics.

- Advanced proficiency in Python, SQL, and common data science toolchains (R, SAS a plus).

- Practical experience with Generative AI, including Large Language Models (LLMs), prompt engineering and RAG architectures, model evaluation, bias mitigation, and explainability.

- Experience with cloud and big data platforms (e.g., Azure, Spark, Databricks, Hadoop).

- Strong understanding of deploying models into production, including monitoring and lifecycle management.

**Leadership & Communication**

- Demonstrated ability to lead and scale teams, mentor data scientists, and manage ambiguity.

- Strong stakeholder management skills with the ability to influence senior leaders across regions.

- Excellent communication and presentation skills, translating technical concepts into business language.

**Benefits:**

- We’ll empower you to learn and grow the career you want.

- We’ll recognize and support you in a flexible environment where well-being and inclusion are more than just words.

- As part of our global team, we’ll support you in shaping the future you want to see.

## Skills

### Required
- AI
- Machine Learning
- Generative AI
- Python
- SQL
- R
- SAS
- Azure
- Spark
- Databricks
- Hadoop

### Nice to have
- underwriting
- insurance
- reinsurance

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Source: [Apply at manulife.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com](https://manulife.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/MFCJH_Jobs/job/Hong-Kong/Lead-Data-Scientist---Underwriting-AI_JR26030867-1?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply)