Lead Data Scientist

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.