Head of Data Science – National Retailer

Head of Data Science

National Retailer

· Work amongst inspirational, friendly, exceptional talent!

· A genuine agile, innovative, highly producitonised data science environment

· Managing and continue to grow a team which has scaled rapidly in recent years

· Deliver real commercial impact for this retail goliath, through a wide variety of data science projects

Salary: £130k – £150k & up to 40% stretch target bonus

Location: London / flexible wfh

Like a lot of companies, our client has developed an internal data science team, but unusually, one to rival the top tech firms in terms of quality of talent, delivery of direct commercial return and opportunity to innovate.

You will lead and continue to grow a team of Data Scientists delivering a wide range of projects leveraging machine learning and AI techniques to optimize and automate processes and inform decision making around trading, pricing and promotions, fulfilment and supply chain.

As the business continues to embrace data science from the top down, you will need to use your skills in guiding, educating and inspiring very senior level stakeholders, as they truly embedd use of data science to drive, inform and change internal processes and the way the business is run.

Importantly, we need a very strong leader of people, someone who understands how to retain top tier talent with challenge and opportunity, support, coaching and career growth. You will need to inspire and lead from the front on project initiation, system design, process definition ensuring all the right Q’s are being asked and answered. Leading the conversation on architecture throughout a project, ensuring they’re built in a productionised way, ensuring the robustness is in place, given the reach the solutions have, across millions of products week in week out.

Their way of working is very practical, from end to end, dealing with customer focused problems, and naturally, you should be comfortable, and ideally have experience with, the typical culture and pace of retail.

Everyone within this centralized data science function can code – so you will need to be able to, too – there is a constant environment of learning, growth and development at every level and truly innovation products and solutions can be delivered. So we are looking for someone who is still ‘hands on’ in order to coach and mentor the rapidly growing team, guiding on best practice etc.

Skills and experience required:

· Educated to at least degree level in a numerate subject such as engineering, mathematics, statistics, chemistry, physics, machine learning, computer science etc.

· Advanced hands on skills using tools such as Python, R, Spark, Hadoop, SQL and cloud based platforms such as GCP, Azure and AWS to manipulate and analyse various data sets in large volumes

· Background in data science from ideally a retail or blue chip background

· Confident and strong presentation skills; ability to bring data to life for senior leaders and non-technical stakeholders

· Thrives in a pacey, entrepreneurial and high performing environment

· Strong team collaboration skills, able to work in a dynamic and solutions focused environment