Lead Data Scientist

WORKING PATTERN: Hybrid, 40% (or two days) at our Bristol office.

About this opportunity…

In Consumer Servicing, we created a multi-channel experience that customers love, colleagues are proud of and make our service proposition a major competitive advantage for the Group.

Would you like to help us deliver exciting customer driven solutions?

About us…

Like the modern Britain we serve, we're evolving. Investing billions in our people, data and tech to transform the way we meet the ever-changing needs of our 26 million customers. We're growing with purpose. Join us on our journey and you'll too…

• Act as a technical lead within the Data Science Modelling Chapter, responsible for helping our project delivery teams to develop and implement best practice solutions
• Own and continually improve upon our current approaches for solving common AI use cases, focused around NLP - blending traditional NLU techniques with GenAI
• Deliver of proofs-of-concepts that demonstrate these new capabilities and how they can deliver value to future projects.
• Contribute to target production architectures of AI systems
• Define automated approaches to common workflows - e.g., for feature selection, hyperparameter tuning, model testing and monitoring, etc.
• Contribute to the recommended training curriculum and progression paths for professional development, from the graduate scheme to senior technical leads

• Previous experience as a Senior Data Scientist or Technical Lead in machine learning.
• Experience leading data scientists and an ability to set technical standards.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to collaborate effectively with other teams.
• A strong ability to translate data science methods and results for nontechnical audiences and to persuade senior business stakeholders of the significance of these results for decision making.
• Thorough theoretical and applied knowledge of ML techniques with a clear depth in Natural Language, deep learning and LLM based workflows
• Cloud engineering in GCP and Azure (Kubernetes, resource requirements, workbooks, key Vaults )
• Understanding of risks and guardrailsfor Generative AI applications
• Skills in Python and SQL for data science, including how to write modular code, familiarity with the core Python data structures and fluency with pandas and other packages commonly used for data science. Strong ability to coach data scientists in how to use these tools to address particular business problems and to review the code they produce.
• The ability to take subject matter knowledge (your own or that of colleagues) and incorporate it into feature selection and engineering and the hypotheses that models are allowed to test. Strong ability to coach data scientists in how to take this approach and to review how they do so.
• The ability to balance coaching and mentoring data scientists with continuing to do hands-on data science work yourself alongside them.
• A pragmatic, "keep it as simple as possible, but no simpler" attitude to your work and designs.

About working for us…

We're disability confident. So, if you would like reasonable adjustments to be made to our recruitment processes, just let us know.

We also offer a wide-ranging benefits package, which includes:

• A generous pension contribution of up to 15%
• An annual bonus award, subject to Group performance
• Share schemes including free shares
• Benefits you can adapt to your lifestyle, such as discounted shopping
• 30 days' holiday, with bank holidays on top
• A range of wellbeing initiatives and generous parental leave policies

Want to do amazing work, that's interesting and makes a difference to millions of people? Join our journey.