AVP Applied AI

Job Overview

AVP Data Science - GD05AE. Join The Hartford’s Business Insurance team as we help shape the future of insurance by delivering production-ready AI solutions that support complex risks, bespoke products, and profitable growth across specialty markets.
Key Responsibilities

Own delivery, performance, and risk outcomes for large, complex Applied AI portfolios spanning multiple teams, domains, or lines of business.
Translate enterprise and business‑unit AI priorities into multi‑year portfolio roadmaps and investment plans.
Ensure applied AI solutions deliver measurable business value while meeting standards for security, reliability, explainability, fairness, safety, and cost efficiency across solution types—including generative, agentic AI, RAG/chat, forecasting, recommendation, anomaly or fraud detection, and multimodal use cases.
Lead and develop senior directors and directors; build leadership bench strength through succession planning, coaching, and capability development.
Ensure consistent application of the Applied AI operating model, decision rights, delivery discipline, and escalation paths across the portfolio.
Reinforce shared expectations for quality, evaluation rigor, and production readiness.
Provide portfolio‑level technical direction and rigorous oversight, partnering closely with Principal ICs, Architecture, AI Platform, and Centers of Excellence.
Ensure consistent adoption of approved AI standards, patterns, and guardrails.
Review and evaluate portfolio‑level architectural choices, evaluation approaches, production readiness, and operational risk signals, guiding leaders through disciplined trade‑offs across quality, grounding, latency, cost, scalability, and regulatory risk.
Accountable for consistent application of evaluation and monitoring practices across the portfolio, ensuring evaluation frameworks span classification, information retrieval, RAG/chat, forecasting, and customer or operational KPIs.
Oversee governance of metric taxonomies, thresholds, validation evidence, gold and synthetic test sets, A/B testing practices, drift detection, failure‑mode analysis, and incident response expectations.
Ensure evaluation results inform prioritization, release decisions, and risk management at the executive level.
Set portfolio‑level expectations and governance for unstructured data and retrieval practices, including document ingestion pipelines, parsing, OCR, layout‑aware extraction, metadata and lineage management, access controls, PII detection and redaction, and auditability.
Accountable for portfolio-level AI governance ensuring alignment with Legal, Compliance, Model Risk, Privacy, Security, and Audit partners.
Maintain readiness for audits and regulatory review by ensuring governance artifacts, controls, escalation paths, and operational evidence are consistently established and enforced.
Escalate material risks, trade‑offs, and investment decisions to VPs with clear options and implications.
Partner with senior leaders across Product, Technology, Operations, Claims, Underwriting, Finance, and HR to align Applied AI delivery with business outcomes.
Influence portfolio funding, prioritization, and workforce planning through evidence‑based assessments of delivery performance, evaluation outcomes, and risk considerations.
Oversee portfolio‑level planning, dependencies, resourcing, and financial stewardship.
Adjust plans to address shifting priorities, capacity constraints, emerging technical risks, or regulatory changes.
Drive continuous improvement in delivery effectiveness, operational resilience, governance maturity, and value realization across the Applied AI portfolio.
Skills & Experience

Demonstrated experience leading large, complex Applied AI portfolios in regulated enterprise environments.
Proven ability to lead senior directors and staff, building durable leadership capacity and consistent operating discipline across organizations.
Strong technical and regulatory fluency across applied AI—including generative and agentic AI, retrieval‑augmented systems, evaluation and monitoring practices, and production AI operations.
Applied understanding of unstructured data and retrieval approaches, including document ingestion pipelines, OCR, layout‑aware extraction, embeddings, hybrid and dense retrieval, reranking, metadata and lineage management, and PII controls.
Deep familiarity with AI governance, model risk management, responsible AI practices, and compliance‑by‑design expectations.
Demonstrated success translating strategy into coordinated execution and investment decisions across multiple teams over multi‑year horizons.
Ability to influence VPs and senior partners through clear, data‑driven communication of technical trade‑offs, evaluation outcomes, portfolio risks, and business impact.
Education & Credentials

12+ years of applicable experience with at least a Bachelor’s degree (fewer years may be accepted with a higher degree).
Master’s or Ph.D. preferred in Machine Learning, Applied Mathematics, Data Science, Computer Science, or a similar analytical field; progress towards a relevant professional designation acceptable.
7–10+ years of experience leading leaders, large portfolios, or complex programs.
Compensation

The listed annualized base pay range is $182,400 – $273,600. Actual base pay may vary based on performance, proficiency, and demonstration of required competencies. The base pay is one component of The Hartford’s total compensation package, which may include short‑term or annual bonuses, long‑term incentives, and on‑the‑spot recognition.
Equal Opportunity Employer/Sex/Race/Color/Veterans/Disability/Sexual Orientation/Gender Identity or Expression/Religion/Age

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