Principal Data Scientist - Financial Crime AI

About the role

Commonwealth Bank is looking for a Principal Data Scientist for its Financial Crime AI team within the Chief Operations Office. You will be a hands-on technical leader working in cross-functional squads with engineers and other experts to design and deliver innovative, responsible and high-impact AI solutions that help detect, deter and eliminate financial crime. You will also guide the team on technically demanding problems as AI evolves.

Key responsibilities

• Lead GenAI and agentic system design and development: prototype, design, develop, deploy and set up monitoring for GenAI and agentic solutions that improve prevention, detection and investigation of financial crime, while setting technical direction and best practices.
• Develop and implement machine learning models: prototype, design, build, deploy and monitor a variety of models.
• Identify potential AI opportunities across financial crime for future focus.
• Work with financial crime stakeholders to understand risk and operational pain points, driving adoption of AI and GenAI to improve detection and investigative outcomes.

Required profile

• Ability to coordinate across the financial crime and COO data science community and drive reusable, group-wide outcomes.
• Intellectual curiosity and willingness to learn, experiment and lead new concepts.
• Experience designing and deploying generative AI, including prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation, guardrails, orchestration and evaluation frameworks, using tools such as LangChain and LangGraph.
• Expertise in machine learning: natural language processing, unsupervised clustering and classification, feature engineering, model selection, hyperparameter tuning, evaluation and production deployment.
• Experience with version control and CI/CD pipelines such as GitHub.
• Hands-on experience with Spark, Python, R, TensorFlow, PyTorch and SQL.
• Knowledge of ETL processes and data pipeline construction.
• Familiarity with Docker for containerisation and deployment.
• Understanding of AWS or Azure cloud architecture and integration.

The role offers the flexibility to work from any of the bank's engineering hubs within Australia. Applicants who are already part of the Commonwealth Bank Group (including Bankwest and x15ventures) must apply through the internal Sidekick process.