Lead Data Scientist - Industrial AI & Prognostics

We are seeking an experienced Industrial AI Scientist to join our expanding data science and artificial intelligence team. This role offers an opportunity to contribute to high-impact industrial AI initiatives across NOV’s global products and services while helping shape the growth of our India-based technical organization.

As the India team continues to expand, the successful candidate will have the opportunity to take on increased technical leadership responsibilities, including leading and mentoring members of the data science team in the coming year. This role is well suited for an experienced individual who enjoys solving complex engineering problems, developing practical AI solutions, and helping build a strong, collaborative technical team.

The successful candidate will bring strong expertise in AI/ML, industrial applications, and applied research. Depending on their background, they may contribute primarily to one or more of the following areas:

Predictive Maintenance, Condition-Based Maintenance, and Prognostics and Health Management (PHM).

• Oil and Gas, including petroleum engineering, drilling, production, and related engineering research.

• Generative AI applications, including enterprise AI, Large Language Models (LLMs), intelligent engineering tools, and cloud-based AI solutions.

Responsibilities

This role requires the ability to translate research and emerging technologies into scalable, production-ready solutions that improve operational performance, engineering decision-making, asset reliability, and business outcomes.

• Serve as a technical expert in Industrial AI, providing leadership and consulting support to NOV business units and engineering teams.
• Identify high-value industrial and engineering use cases for artificial intelligence, machine learning, and advanced analytics.
• Design, develop, validate, deploy, and monitor production-ready AI/ML solutions.
• Lead the full data science and AI lifecycle, including problem definition, data exploration, feature engineering, model development, validation, deployment, and performance monitoring.

• Develop solutions in one or more focus areas:

  • Predictive maintenance, equipment health monitoring, anomaly detection, fault diagnosis, Remaining Useful Life (RUL) prediction, and maintenance optimization

  • Oil and gas applications, including drilling analytics, well and reservoir-related workflows, production optimization, and petroleum engineering research

  • Generative AI, LLMs, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), intelligent agents, document intelligence, and AI-assisted engineering applications

• Apply advanced methods in machine learning, deep learning, time-series modeling, computer vision, natural language processing, Generative AI, and LLMs.
• Collaborate with petroleum engineers, mechanical engineers, software developers, product teams, data engineers, and subject matter experts to convert business needs into practical AI solutions.
• Design scalable data and analytics pipelines and contribute to cloud-based AI and MLOps platforms.
• Evaluate emerging AI technologies, conduct applied research, and translate research outcomes into industrial solutions.
• Communicate technical findings, recommendations, and project outcomes to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Contribute to technical documentation, publications, patents, invention disclosures, and innovation initiatives.
• Support the expansion of NOV’s data science capabilities in India by sharing knowledge, establishing best practices, and contributing to team development.
• Take on increasing leadership responsibilities, with the opportunity to lead and mentor the India-based data science team in the coming year.
• Mentor junior team members and promote best practices in AI, machine learning, software engineering, and responsible technology adoption.

Qualifications

We are looking for a motivated and technically strong professional who can work independently and collaboratively, manage multiple priorities, and apply advanced AI methods to real-world industrial problems. The ideal candidate will also be interested in helping build and lead a growing data science organization.

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, Engineering, Applied Mathematics, Statistics, Petroleum Engineering, or a related STEM discipline, with 10 or more years of relevant industrial experience.

• Master’s degree in a relevant discipline with 8 or more years of relevant industrial experience is preferred.

• Ph.D. in a relevant discipline with 7 or more years of industrial experience is preferred.

• Relevant industrial experience may include work in Industrial AI, data science, machine learning, petroleum engineering, drilling research, engineering analytics, software engineering, or related fields.

• Demonstrated ability to deliver AI/ML solutions from research or concept through production deployment.

• Experience mentoring, guiding, or technically leading data scientists or multidisciplinary engineering teams is preferred.

• Strong foundation in machine learning, deep learning, statistical modeling, optimization, and predictive analytics.

• Experience with one or more of the following

o Time-series analysis, anomaly detection, fault diagnosis, and failure prediction

o Computer vision and image or video analytics

o Natural language processing and information retrieval

o Generative AI, LLMs, RAG, prompt engineering, and AI agents.