Senior Data Scientist in Southampton

We are a fast-moving technology company, and one of the most successful providers of online reward and benefits solutions in the world. We believe that everyone deserves an exceptional experience at work, every day, and build workplace technology that makes this happen. Benifex’s mission is to build remarkable experiences that employees love. Today Benifex supports more than five million employees in over 3,000 organisations across more than 100 countries. To help us on our quest to be the best, we need brilliant people on board.

Why should you apply?

• Challenge: Implement a scalable data platform to meet our internal and external analytics needs.
• Impact: Be one of the first hires to help build a world class data engineering function.
• Scale: A key pillar of our global growth plan is data, allowing us to make better decisions and deliver more value to our users.

**Please note we are unable to offer visa sponsorship and require people to be based in the UK or Ireland for this position**

Great benefits:

• £70,000-90,000
• Tech setup of your choice (MacBook Pro or equivalent, monitors, etc.)
• £/€800 annual learning budget, plus two hours per week as ‘Focus Fridays’.
• Flexible work – choose a working setup that works for you, our only ask is to see you once a month in the office and you must be based in the UK or Ireland.
• Full access to our comprehensive benefits package, including discounts from hundreds of high street brands, salary sacrifice schemes across Finance, Health, Tech, and more.
• 25 days holiday plus your local bank holidays.
• Your birthday off.
• Two half day wellbeing days.
• Healthcare cash plan to cover the costs of day-to-day healthcare.
• Employee Assistance Plan 24/7 365 support.
• Income Protection (75%) and life assurance (4x salary).
• Referral bonuses.
• Enhanced parental leave package - 26 weeks fully paid maternity leave and 4 weeks fully paid paternity leave.
• Work from Anywhere policy for 90 days.
• Buy and Sell scheme for holidays.
• £50 monthly allowance to spend on whatever takes your fancy, your very own Benifex card will be topped up at the start of each month!

Role Overview:

We are seeking a skilled Data Scientist to join our AI Squad and play a key role in building the analytical and predictive capabilities that power Benifex products. You will work closely with engineers, product managers, and data stakeholders to develop models that turn our HR and benefits data into meaningful insights for our customers. This is a hands-on role focused on forecasting, statistical modelling, exploratory analysis, and applied machine learning. You will contribute to the intelligence behind Brain, our HR AI assistant, helping ensure that the insights we deliver are accurate, reliable, and actionable. You will join a collaborative team across Cebu and the UK, working in a dynamic environment where we solve complex problems together and continuously learn.

Responsibilities:

• Design and build forecasting and predictive models for benefits spend, cost drivers, headcount trends, and benefit utilisation.
• Conduct exploratory data analysis to uncover patterns, anomalies, and drivers within our HR and benefits datasets.
• Develop well-structured feature sets and work with Data Engineering to improve data readiness and data quality.
• Create evaluation and benchmarking frameworks to assess model performance, identify drift, and improve reliability over time.
• Communicate insights, modelling decisions, and trade-offs clearly to AI, Product, and Data teams.
• Support the refinement of AI components by improving model inputs, analysing outcomes, and feeding insights into AI system improvements.
• Stay up to date with developments in statistics, forecasting techniques, and applied machine learning.

LLM-focused activities (secondary):

• Support evaluation of LLM outputs through structured benchmarking.
• Contribute to improvements in retrieval and context pipelines by analysing data and output behaviour.
• Help optimise prompts and model inputs where modelling intersects with LLM tasks.

What are we looking for?

• Strong hands-on experience in Python for data analysis and shallow and deep machine modelling, using libraries such as NumPy, Pandas, scikit-learn, TensorFlow or PyTorch.
• Experience building forecasting and predictive models with clear understanding of time-series techniques and model validation.
• Strong grounding in statistical analysis and exploratory data techniques.
• Experience designing or contributing to model evaluation frameworks, including accuracy, stability, and drift metrics.
• Solid understanding of data preparation, data quality, and feature engineering.
• Ability to communicate modelling approaches and insights to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Comfortable working in a collaborative, cross-functional environment where models inform product decisions.

Bonus Points:

• Experience working with HR, finance, or operational datasets.
• Familiarity with embeddings or retrieval methods, especially where they support downstream modelling.
• Exposure to LLM evaluation or prompt optimisation.
• Awareness of basic ML engineering principles for deploying or packaging models, even if you are not responsible for full MLOps.
• Experience with cloud environments or BI tools.
• Exposure backend engineering, including REST APIs (Java, Springboot) and full-stack architecture.

Even if you don't meet all of the requirements for this role, we encourage you to apply! We are looking for talented and passionate individuals who are eager to learn and grow. We also offer a variety of other roles, so please check out our careers page to see if there is something else that might be a good fit for you.

Our interview process:

• Initial informal call with the Talent team.
• Interview with our Engineering Manager 30 min.
• Technical Task.
• Technical Interview - 60 min.
• Final interview with VP of Engineering - 30-45 min.

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, colour, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. We are committed to creating a diverse and inclusive workplace where everyone feels welcome and respected. We believe that diversity and inclusion are essential to our success, and we are proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We are a proud member of the Disability Confident employer scheme. If you require any reasonable adjustments at any stage during the recruitment process, please let us know with your application.