Data Scientist, Principal

About the role:

• We’re looking for a strategically minded and AI‑expert Principal Data Scientist to design and elevate how Blackbaud delivers decision intelligence at enterprise scale. In this role, you will combine strategic thinking with deep AI expertise to transform how predictive models, business logic, and generative AI come together into trusted, production‑ready intelligence.
• You’ll partner across data, platform, and business teams to shape how decisions are generated, explained, and governed—fueling responsible, AI‑powered solutions that help organizations move faster with confidence. This role plays a critical leadership role in Blackbaud’s evolution into an AI‑native company, advancing how intelligence is embedded into products and decision workflows.

What you'll do

• Lead the design of enterprise decision intelligence systems that combine predictive models, business rules, and generative AI into clear, actionable outputs
• Establish scalable decision modeling patterns that support recommendations, prioritization, risk scoring, anomaly detection, and summarization across the business
• Define how contextual data is transformed into decision‑ready intelligence that is interpretable, explainable, and aligned to enterprise meaning
• Guide the development of production‑grade machine learning and generative AI solutions, ensuring outputs are grounded, testable, and reliable
• Build and evolve evaluation frameworks that measure decision quality, including accuracy, calibration, drift, groundedness, and consistency over time
• Partner cross‑functionally with data, architecture, and platform teams to ensure decision systems are observable, scalable, and aligned to enterprise standards
• Lead root‑cause analysis of decision or model failures and translate insights into systemic improvements across teams