Lead Data Scientist
£600/day (Inside IR35)
6 Months contract
Flexible UK working with occasional onsite presence in London, Birmingham or Basingstoke
I'm currently supporting a client looking for a hands-on Lead Data Scientist to take ownership of an established data science capability operating within a live customer-facing product.
This is not a greenfield build. The priority is ensuring continuity, stability and value delivery from existing production machine learning models while providing technical leadership to a small team.
You'll be responsible for:
• Owning and maintaining production ML models
• Providing technical oversight and quality assurance
• Supporting and mentoring two junior Data Scientists
• Defining model monitoring, alerting and retraining processes
• Translating technical outputs into business value for stakeholders
• Working closely with product, engineering, analytics and business teams
Current environment:
• Databricks
• Customer-facing product platform
• NLP model processing structured and unstructured data
• Ensemble-based predictive model forecasting performance and longevity outcomes
We're looking for someone with:
• Strong NLP and supervised machine learning experience
• Experience managing production-grade ML systems
• MLOps and model lifecycle management expertise
• Previous experience leading or mentoring Data Scientists
• Excellent stakeholder engagement and communication skills
This would suit a Senior or Lead Data Scientist who enjoys balancing hands-on technical work with team leadership and business engagement.
If you're interested, or know someone who could be a good fit, please get in touch.