This is a newly established team with a sea of use cases and opportunities ahead of them to have a business impact. Just starting out their journey, looking at the art of what’s possible in the application of modern data science techniques across machine learning, artificial intelligence and NLP for customer and business benefit.

It’s within a business with one of the UK’s largest relational databases which generates tens of billions of lines of data each week. In a team moving to a ‘tool agnostic’ mentality, so there’s opportunities to cross develop your technical skills on both R and Python, as well as a sea of other platforms and automation tools looking to be brought in to help support their ambition.

Despite this role being appointed initially as a maternity cover engagement, this team is new – with an incredible amount of new things to test and trial. This will most likely lead to further growth of the team, so there is significant potential for this role to translate across to perm.

ABOUT THE ROLE

Following a significant change in business structure, they’ve brought together their 3 consumer brands into the one operational business, pulling their data teams together and creating this new function.

The resultant data environment is huge (circa 34m customers). Containing everything about their customers – their interactions, value, behaviours, financial interactions and anything else they’re able to capture and store in a GDPR compliant manner.

We’re talking billions of lines of data each week, pertaining to multiple product offerings across the 3 consumer brands.

They’re now moving beyond traditional propensity modelling, looking to apply AI, ML and NLP techniques. Understanding the art of what’s possible in their application to the data assets they hold. Empowering decision making with ever more relevant and commercially useful, real time and automated insight, designed to benefit the business and its customers.

There’s a huge amount of use cases which need testing and proving, offering a real variety to the work and its potential impact. They’re also changing their approach to the tools they use, moving to a tool agnostic mentality – reflecting best tool for the job, rather than being silo’d into just Python and/or R – for example.

HOW THIS ROLE LINES UP

You’re going to be managing a team of Data Scientists. Looking after the strategic direction of the team and ensuring what they’re doing is correctly prioritised. They’re capable and skilled enough to deliver to it (coaching and supporting where necessary), and outputs are commercially relevant and able to be applied to the business, handling the senior stakeholder engagement.

This role will keep a hands-on element. So you need to be comfortable taking on a role where this accounts for around 40% of your time. Naturally because of the need to coach and mentor more junior members of the team, being fully conversant with the application of various Data Science techniques to solving commercial challenges is a ‘must have’ skill.

WHY APPLY?

• Their data team has consistently grown in recent years across BI, Reporting, Customer Insight, CRM ops, etc. evolving to meet the growing demand for data of the firm. Data Science, being new, represents such massive potential to drive value. So their initial structure of 3 managers is highly likely to need to grow and evolve too once these use cases are proven, and the data science capability expands to support the business further
• Real opportunity to drive results. They’re still at the start of their journey and there’s lots of things to test and learn from
• The opportunity to shape and develop a new team
• An incredibly data rich environment – one which has granular information about their customers, with a proper relationship over time showing detailed behaviours, interests and insights which can be successfully leveraged in analysis projects – this role’s for you
• If you’re looking for a firm with a great reputation, one which will definitely add to your CV, and a business whose average tenure for employees is 8+ years due to high employee satisfaction – this role’s for you.

ROLE: Data Science Manager (12 month fixed term contract)

LOCATION: London (Central)

SALARY: £65,000 to 75,000 base salary

BENEFITS: 10% on target bonus, pension (to 10% employer cont.), healthcare, life assurance, 25 days leave

KEY EXPERIENCE NECESSARY

You’re able to demonstrate these 4 key attributes:

• Domain knowledge – as a data scientist, commercially applying the relevant techniques and connecting the dots into insights you’ve driven to achieve commercial impact, supporting business decisions and driving results
• You’re able to communicate effectively and articulately with non-data science stakeholders. Story-telling insights, establishing their buy-in and understanding to recommended courses of action
• You’ve got a maths/stats background through education, achieving decent results
• You’re comfortable learning new coding languages. Happy with a role that’s tool agnostic and you’ve always been curious about learning new things, techniques and their application in the commercial world

Commercial experience

• Management of data scientists – this can be as maybe a Senior DS, training more junior DS talent
• Experience can come from agency, client or consulting environments
• Got to be able to demonstrate experience of handling projects end to end
• Solid stakeholder engagement, management and communication skills – particularly articulating findings in a meaningful and impactful manner
• If you’ve experience working in a relational/subscriptions type consumer business, that would be beneficial
• You’re working with large-scale/Big Data already (doesn’t have to be to the same scale here, but it’s going to translate okay stepping up from millions to billions of rows)

Technical skills

• You’re confident with R or Python already (you may know both)
• SQL coding is easy for you
• Good knowledge of various modelling and predictive techniques – AI, ML, propensity, etc.

Unfortunately this company isn’t able to provide sponsorship, so you will need the ability to live and work in the UK without sponsorship

TO APPLY

For further information please contact:

Colin Doree
Managing Consultant
colin@bluepelican.com
01892 507122

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