Data Scientist II

Medica is a nonprofit health plan with more than a million members, serving communities in Minnesota, Nebraska, Wisconsin, Missouri, and beyond. We deliver personalized health care experiences and partner closely with providers to ensure members are genuinely cared for.

We're a team that owns our work with accountability, makes data-driven decisions, embraces continuous learning, and celebrates collaboration because success is a team sport. It's our mission to be there in the moments that matter most for our members and employees. Join us in creating a community of connected care, where coordinated, quality service is the norm and every member feels valued.

As a Data Scientist II at Medica, you will lead initiatives in predictive modeling to support population health strategies and enterprise decision-making. You will partner with stakeholders across the organization to translate analytical insights into scalable solutions and improved business processes.

Key Accountabilities

• Lead the development and maintenance of predictive models for medical expense and utilization forecasting to support population health strategies, financial planning, and enterprise decisionmaking.
• Design and implement analytical solutions to identify potential fraud, waste, and abuse by detecting outliers, anomalous patterns, and emerging risk signals across claims and related data sources.
• Partner closely with the Special Investigations Unit (SIU) and other business stakeholders to investigate model findings, refine detection logic, and support case development through datadriven insights.
• Apply natural language processing and large language model techniques to unstructured data, such as call center transcripts, to uncover trends, risks, and opportunities for improved member and operational outcomes.
• Research, evaluate, and apply appropriate statistical and machine learning modeling techniques such as regression, classification, anomaly detection, decision trees, and ensemble methods to improve model performance, interpretability, and business relevance.
• Collaborate with actuarial, finance, clinical, and enterprise analytics teams to embed predictive outputs into planning, monitoring, and decisionmaking workflows.
• Contribute to the design and evolution of governed, scalable data science pipelines and model deployment processes in partnership with data engineering and IT teams.
• Support analytics infrastructure and tooling (e.g., Snowflake, Azure) to ensure models are reproducible, secure, and aligned with enterprise data governance standards.

Candidate Profile

The successful candidate will demonstrate the ability to lead and deliver complex healthcare analytics projects, apply sound statistical and machine learning techniques, and translate analytical findings into actionable insights. They will bring strong problemsolving skills, intellectual curiosity, and the ability to collaborate effectively across technical and business teams.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience in Data Science, Statistics, Computer Science, or a related field.
• 3+ years of professional experience beyond degree in advanced analytics, statistics, or data science.
• Experience applying predictive modeling or statistical analysis to realworld business problems, preferably in a healthcare setting.
• Proficiency in at least one programming language commonly used for data science (e.g., Python, R, or SAS).
• Strong SQL skills and experience working with relational databases.

Preferred Qualifications

• Master's degree in a quantitative discipline.
• Experience working with healthcare data, including claims, clinical, or operational datasets.
• Experience with advanced modeling approaches such as ensemble methods, deep learning, or natural language processing.
• Familiarity with source control and collaborative development workflows.
• Experience working in cloudbased analytics environments and contributing to scalable data science pipelines.
• Ability to communicate complex analytical concepts clearly to nontechnical audiences.

This position is an Office role, which requires an employee to work onsite at our Minnetonka, MN office, on average, 3 days per week.

The full salary grade for this position is $72,100 - $123,600. While the full salary grade is provided, the typical hiring salary range for this role is expected to be between $72,100 - $97,850. Annual salary range placement will depend on a variety of factors including, but not limited to, education, work experience, applicable certifications and/or licensure, the position's scope and responsibility, internal pay equity and external market salary data. In addition to compensation, Medica offers a generous total rewards package that includes competitive medical, dental, vision, PTO, Holidays, paid volunteer time off, 401K contributions, caregiver services and many other benefits to support our employees.

The compensation and benefits information is provided as of the date of this posting. Medica's compensation and benefits are subject to change at any time, with or without notice, subject to applicable law.

Eligibility to work in the US: Medica does not offer work visa sponsorship for this role. All candidates must be legally authorized to work in the United States at the time of application. Employment is contingent on verification of identity and eligibility to work in the United States.

We are an Equal Opportunity employer, where all qualified candidates receive consideration for employment indiscriminate of race, religion, ethnicity, national origin, citizenship, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or any other protected characteristic.