Head of Data Science (Hands-On)

Head of Data Science (Hands-On)

Location – London (Hybrid)

Experienced in leading Data, Machine Learning and GenAI teams and projects within a large corporate but still hands on?

Good skills with LLM applications, RAG, embeddings, vector search, and custom retrieval patterns?

Great with stakeholders?

Commercially astute with good business acumen as well as technical ability?

If so I might have a role for you!

The Role

My clients, (A Leading International Law Firm and also a Defence Contractor) both have some urgent requirements to appoint experienced Data Science Professionals in a senior capacity to lead and manage their AI, Data and ML aligned projects.

Purpose of the roles are to lead, define and deliver data and AI-enabled products and capabilities within the business. This is a senior, hands-on leadership role for someone who can set direction, translate high-value problems into scalable solutions, design robust data and GenAI architectures, and drive delivery into production with clear governance and measurable outcomes.

The successful candidates will operate within the realms of solution architecture, applied ML/GenAI, product delivery, and senior stakeholder management. You will lead use cases such as document intelligence, knowledge retrieval and search, due diligence, pricing/profitability insights, workflow automation, and agent-enabled assistants, while establishing the evaluation, monitoring, Responsible AI controls, and adoption metrics needed to scale impact across the wider business.

Key Duties and Responsibilities

• Set the technical strategy and solution direction for the businesses Data & AI portfolio across all business functions.
• Co-create the AI roadmap with senior stakeholders, prioritising opportunities by business value, feasibility, risk, and platform readiness.
• Turn ambiguous problem statements into target architectures, delivery plans, and clear technical requirements.
• Lead the design and implementation of ML, NLP, GenAI, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) solutions.
• Own the solution architecture patterns for orchestration, retrieval, evaluation, monitoring, security, and human-in-the-loop review.
• Deliver document-heavy AI use cases (e.g., OCR/document intelligence, clause extraction, due diligence, knowledge search, workflow automation).
• Partner with product and platform engineering, tech and business teams to integrate AI into core systems and workflows.
• Assess third-party vendors/tools and advise on capability fit, integration effort, governance, commercial model, and strategic longevity.
• Define standards for experimentation, validation, model quality, and release readiness (evaluation, testing, and monitoring).
• Coach and mentor data scientists, analysts, and cross-functional contributors; uplift delivery maturity and engineering standards.

Key Skills & Experience

• Significant experience leading Data, ML, and GenAI initiatives in complex enterprise and/or regulated environments.
• Proven ability to blend strategy, stakeholder leadership, and hands-on technical delivery to achieve measurable outcomes.
• Strong working knowledge of Python and SQL, ML workflows, and modern GenAI tooling.
• Experience building statistical and measurement frameworks (e.g., adoption/usage, quality, value tracking, experimentation design).
• Strong experience with LLM applications, RAG, embeddings, vector search, and custom retrieval patterns.
• Experience designing and delivering solutions on Azure and Databricks (including Azure OpenAI and Azure AI Foundry or equivalent capabilities).
• Experience with document-heavy AI use cases (OCR/document intelligence, search, summarisation, extraction, and classification).
• Strong stakeholder management skills, with the ability to influence senior leaders and align IT and business teams.
• Track record of defining governance, evaluation, security, and Responsible AI controls for deployed solutions.
• Ability to lead multi-disciplinary delivery teams and mentor technical practitioners while remaining credible at architecture depth.

My clients both offer a very competitive salary, annual bonus, excellent benefits and flexible hybrid working within a friendly, professional and supportive team and there are excellent opportunities for further development within the businesses, globally.