Lead Data Scientist

iO Associates
West Midlands
4 days ago
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Overview

Lead Data Scientist
Location: Midlands based HQ with weekly on-site presence
Salary: Up to £75,000 plus competitive bonus and benefits

A large UK consumer eCommerce business is scaling a new internal advertising and monetisation platform and is hiring a Lead Data Scientist to take technical ownership of its core algorithms. This is a technical leadership role with end-to-end ownership of the algorithm roadmap. You will set direction, make architectural decisions, and lead delivery from experimentation through to production in a high-scale environment.

Responsibilities
  • Own the technical and algorithm roadmap for a large-scale internal ads platform.
  • Design, test and deploy advanced predictive and ranking models such as Two-Tower architectures, RNNs and learning-to-rank approaches.
  • Lead architecture, model selection and production design decisions.
  • Improve feedback loops to increase responsiveness to real-world events and outcomes.
  • Set best practices for production ML, testing, monitoring and deployment.
  • Act as the technical authority for data science across the ads domain.
  • Work closely with engineering, product and commercial teams.
  • Present outcomes and recommendations to senior stakeholders in clear business terms.
What you bring
  • Strong background in data science applied to personalisation, recommendations or ranking problems.
  • Proven experience owning and delivering production machine learning systems.
  • Advanced hands-on experience with PyTorch or TensorFlow.
  • Strong Python and SQL skills with experience in distributed processing such as PySpark.
  • Comfortable making technical trade-offs in complex, ambiguous environments.
  • Able to translate complex technical work into commercial impact.
Nice to have
  • Experience in AdTech or monetisation systems.
  • Familiarity with MLflow, Databricks and modern DevOps tooling.
  • Experience working in large-scale consumer or eCommerce environments.
Working style and benefits
  • Weekly on-site presence with flexible working.
  • Competitive base salary with annual performance bonus
  • Sharesave scheme.
  • Private medical insurance.
  • Pension contribution.
  • 25 days holiday plus bank holidays with buy and sell options.
  • Staff discounts.
  • Subsidised food and on-site facilities.
  • Gym discounts.
  • Digital GP service and wellbeing support.
Why join

You will be joining a business operating at national and international scale, investing heavily in applied machine learning that directly impacts revenue. This is not a research role. Your work will be put into production, used at scale, and you will be accountable for its impact.


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