Senior Manager, Data Science - Institutional Analytics & Research

If you're passionate about building a better future for individuals, communities, and our country-and you're committed to working hard to play your part in building that future-consider WGU as the next step in your career.

Driven by a mission to expand access to higher education through online, competency-based degree programs, WGU is also committed to being a great place to work for a diverse workforce of student-focused professionals. The university has pioneered a new way to learn in the 21st century, one that has received praise from academic, industry, government, and media leaders. Whatever your role, working for WGU gives you a part to play in helping students graduate, creating a better tomorrow for themselves and their families.

The salary range for this position takes into account the wide range of factors that are considered in making compensation decisions including but not limited to skill sets; experience and training; licensure and certifications; and other business and organizational needs.

At WGU, it is not typical for an individual to be hired at or near the top of the range for their position, and compensation decisions are dependent on the facts and circumstances of each case. A reasonable estimate of the current range is:

Job Description

The Senior Manager, Data Science leads a team of Data Scientists and Analysts to develop AI/ML-powered models that drive real-time decision-making in faculty workflows. This role focuses on reducing manual effort and "administrivia" in academic processes by supporting building and implementing predictive and prescriptive systems to provide personalized interventions, enabling faculty to act with precision and efficiency, while reducing "decision fatigue".

This position plays a critical role in building WGU's Decision Intelligence capability and will serve as a thought partner and subject matter expert in the integration of machine learning models into university operations. With WGU's recent adoption of the Decision Intelligence platform, this leader will work to unlock its potential and drive automation and simulation-based decision-making across the academic experience.

The Senior Manager will partner with stakeholders across Academic Delivery, Schools, Product, MLOps, and other teams to ensure solutions are not only accurate but embedded into the systems faculty and students use daily. This role is responsible for shaping the vision of AI-driven decision support, leading technical development, and ensuring continuous learning through faculty feedback loops.

Primary Responsibilities
* Leads and oversees the documentation of data and analytics needs in projects and programs of high complexity with a student and equity-centered lens, collaborating with peers, cross-functional partners, and leaders. Leads the review and triage of user stories, evaluates their business relevance and priority, and translates them into technical requirements that inform the team's backlog. Defines requirement analysis best practices and drives their adoption across IAR.
* Sets and manages expectations in cross-functional projects and programs of high complexity, ensuring realistic goal-setting and effective communication about scope, timelines, outcomes, and dependencies.
* Establishes trust and builds strong relationships with cross-functional partners and senior stakeholders.
* Drives tasks, activities, and large-scale, cross-functional projects and programs with high autonomy, confidence, and collaboration with peers and partners. Defines and owns project plans and communications, proactively manages dependencies, identifies risks and suitable mitigation strategies, manages resource allocation and capacity, and ensures alignment across the team, leaders, and stakeholders. Breaks down complex goals into concrete tasks and activities and actively supports leaders in cross-functional project and program planning. Tracks and reports progress, dependencies, and challenges diligently.
* Owns resource planning for their team and projects and participates in resource planning at the department level.
* Participates in the definition of objectives at the department level. Ensures their team's tactical objectives and operational activities align with the university's strategic goals.
* Oversees engagements with external service providers (e.g., software, consultancy services, team augmentation, data services), including contract negotiation in collaboration with Procurement.
* Identifies adequate data sources and data sets to evaluate hypotheses, produce forecasts, and support findings of analytics projects and experiments. Collaborates with Data Engineering in developing ETL/ELT processes and data pipelines.
* Combines data analysis, visualization, and narrative structures to convey information in compelling ways that instigate deliberate action.
* Regarded by peers and leaders as a role model. Provides constructive feedback and shares technical and institutional knowledge with others regularly. Collaborates with IAR leadership towards the growth and development of other team members.
* Conveys information effectively to peers, partners, senior leaders, and, as project require, external audiences, using a variety of resources and formats (synchronous and asynchronous, verbal and written) such as e-mails, presentations, meetings, and workshops. Is open and responsive to feedback. Defines and owns, in collaboration with communications teams as relevant, communication plans for complex, high-visibility projects and programs that span several university departments.
* Creates and organizes information about processes, projects, operations, data assets, and insights, making it accessible in ways that increase the university's knowledge and efficiency. Writes and interprets technical documentation (e.g., Entity-Relationship, Conceptual, Logical, and Physical data models). Plays a leading role in the continuous improvement of the university's data management platforms (e.g., data dictionaries, catalogs, etc.), collaborating with Data Engineering and other data and analytics teams.
* Familiarized with the university's most relevant KPIs, the drivers that affect them, and plays a leading role in their definition and tracking to ensure we measure what matters and drive operational accountability. Applies sound judgment, systems-thinking, and analytical skills to assess risks, perform root-cause analyses, make recommendations, and drive cross-functional decisions that contribute to the achievement of the university's objectives. Leads strategic planning and operational excellence initiatives across IAR.
* Designs large-scale solutions and collaborates effectively with other technical specialists (e.g., data engineers) in the construction of data products, systems, models, and applications.
* Understands and abides by the relevant policies and methods to access, use, transform, store, and delete data in responsible, secure, and compliant ways. Identifies data security risks when dealing with concrete data sets and takes adequate mitigation actions.
* Performs other job-related duties as assigned.

Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities
* Ability to create healthy work environments conducive to collaboration, learning, accountability, and high performance. Experienced in the strategic and tactical responsibilities of a people leadership role, including capacity planning, hiring, onboarding, coaching, providing feedback, supporting the definition of individual development plans, appraising performance, and succession planning.
* Experienced in defining team and individual objectives utilizing OKRs, SMART metrics, and similar frameworks.
* Ability answer complex business questions requiring extensive knowledge of the university's data assets across several domains and departments. Advanced SQL proficiency, with experience writing queries and subqueries, modifying data (INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE), creating views, and knowledge of the different join types, filtering, sorting, aggregation, window functions, common table expressions (CTE), and performance tuning.
* Ability to interpret and design models that describe how data relate to one another and to the properties of the real-world entities they represent. Understands conceptual and logical data modeling, and has experience with dimensional models, star schema, and snowflake schema.
* Experienced in using tools like Tableau and Power BI to present data and information utilizing charts, graphs, and maps, in ways that make it easy to understand trends, patterns, and outliers.
* Has advanced experience in the selection and deployment of a variety of mathematical models, forecasting methods (e.g., time series, inferential, regression), descriptive statistics, and classification algorithms to make predictions and identify relationships based on limited sets of data.
* Has extensive experience using Python, R, and/or Natural Language Processing in an ML environment, requiring little to no supervision.
* Comfortable with common project management methodologies and frameworks (e.g., Waterfall, Agile, SDLC). Experienced using tools like JIRA, asana, Trello, and similar to organize and track tasks and projects.
* Proficient in the MS Office suite, including advanced Excel knowledge.
* Proficient in flowchart and diagramming tools like Miro, Visio, Lucidchart, and similar applications.
* Ability to perform with very high levels of autonomy, reliability, self-direction, and with bias for action. Manages conflicting and concurrent activities with minimal need of supervision.
* Actively works to improve own skills and knowledge through internal and external, formal and informal, structured and unstructured learning. Is a lifelong learner and embodies a growth mindset. Stays abreast of innovative developments in their area of work and plays an active role in deploying them at IAR and the university.

Education
* Bachelor's Degree in a related field

Experience
* 7 years of experience in Data Analysis, Business Intelligence, Data Science, Statistics, Decision Intelligence, Research, or a related domain
* 3 years of experience in people leadership

Experience in lieu of education
Equivalent relevant experience performing the essential functions of this job may substitute for education degree requirements. Generally, equivalent relevant experience is defined as 1 year of experience for 1 year of education and is the discretion of the hiring manager.

Preferred Qualifications
* Experience with Higher Education, competency-based, and/or online learning formats.

This job description includes a general representation of job requirements rather than a comprehensive inventory of all required responsibilities or work activities. The contents of this document or related job requirements may change at any time with or without notice.

Position & Application Details

How to Apply: If interested, an application will need to be submitted online. Internal WGU employees will need to apply through the internal job board in Workday.

Additional Information

Disclaimer: The job posting highlights the most critical responsibilities and requirements of the job. It's not all-inclusive.

Accommodations: Applicants with disabilities who require assistance or accommodation during the application or interview process should contact our Talent Acquisition team at recruiting@wgu.edu.

Equal Employment Opportunity: All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to any protected characteristic as required by law.