Recruitment Data Scientist (Football)

Leyton Orient is building a genuinely data-driven recruitment operation where statistical rigour, AI tooling, and traditional scouting judgement work in concert rather than in tension. This role sits at the centre of that ambition.

As Recruitment Data Scientist, you will design and deploy the models, pipelines, and AI-powered workflows that help our Head of Recruitment and Director of Football identify, assess, and prioritise players. You will work with real data from best-in-class providers, have direct access to senior decision-makers, and crucially have genuine scope to build, not just maintain. This is not a research role. The work you produce will directly influence recruitment decisions, shape squad-building strategy, and be presented to coaches and club leadership. If you want to see your work matter, this is the environment for it.

• Modelling & Analytics
  • Develop and apply statistical models and player profiling frameworks, assessing candidate suitability against KPIs aligned with the club's tactical identity and style of play.
  • Build and refine player similarity and clustering models using embedding-based or statistical approaches to surface recruitment targets across defined positional archetypes.
  • Design expected-performance and projection models to evaluate players across different leagues, accounting for competitive level and sample size uncertainty.
  • Identify and monitor transfer market opportunities, including players approaching contract expiry, loan candidates, and undervalued assets relative to profile.
• AI-Powered Workflows
  • Develop and deploy LLM-powered scouting tools, for example, systems that automatically generate structured player summary reports from statistical profiles or unstructured scouting notes.
  • Build retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines over internal scouting databases, enabling natural-language queries against recruitment records.
  • Automate repetitive analytical tasks so the recruitment team receives live, structured outputs, not end-of-week manual decks.
• Data Infrastructure
  • Lead the maintenance and development of the club's recruitment database, ensuring data quality, consistency, and accessibility.
  • Build and maintain automated data pipelines from provider feeds (StatsBomb, Wyscout, SkillCorner or equivalent), transforming raw event, technical and physical data into analysis-ready formats.
  • Establish version-controlled, reproducible workflows so all analysis is auditable and transferable.
• Stakeholder Communication
  • Build clear, compelling visualisations and dashboards that translate complex findings into actionable intelligence for coaches, scouts, and club executives.
  • Present analysis directly to the Head of Recruitment and Director of Football, participating in recruitment meetings and contributing to shortlisting decisions.
  • Work closely with video and live scouts to create feedback loops between qualitative scouting observations and quantitative modelling, bridging the gap between data and lived football judgement.

• Technical Skills
  • Advanced proficiency in Python and the data science stack (pandas/polars, scikit-learn, NumPy, matplotlib/plotly).
  • Strong SQL skills - ability to design schemas, write complex queries, and manage relational data across large datasets.
  • Demonstrated experience integrating LLM APIs (Anthropic, OpenAI, or equivalent) to build AI-assisted workflows, automated pipelines, or analytical tools.
  • Version control proficiency (Git) - all analytical work should be reproducible and code-reviewed.
• Statistical & Analytical Foundation
  • Postgraduate qualification (Master's or equivalent) in Statistics, Applied Mathematics, Machine Learning, Data Science, or a closely related quantitative field, or demonstrated equivalent experience.
  • Deep understanding of statistical inference, uncertainty quantification, and the practical limits of small-sample sports data.
  • Ability to evaluate and communicate model limitations honestly, especially important in a football recruitment context where decisions carry significant financial and sporting risk.
• Communication & Collaboration
  • Strong visualisation and communication skills, with a proven ability to translate complex technical findings into clear, actionable insights for non-technical stakeholders.
  • Comfortable presenting analysis to senior leadership and contributing to fast-paced recruitment decisions.
  • Ability to work collaboratively with scouts, coaches, and football operations staff who have varying levels of data literacy.

• Experience working with football-specific data providers (StatsBomb, Wyscout, SkillCorner, or equivalent), including event data, technical data, and physical data.
• Prior experience in a professional football or broader sports analytics environment.
• Familiarity with tracking data (e.g., StatsBomb 360, SkillCorner, Second Spectrum) and the additional modelling challenges it introduces.
• Experience with vector databases or semantic search systems for unstructured data retrieval.
• Exposure to cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure) for scalable data pipeline deployment.
• Experience with modern data orchestration tools (Airflow, Prefect, dbt).

• Direct access to senior football operations leadership, with genuine influence over recruitment decisions.
• A greenfield build - the opportunity to architect systems and workflows from the ground up, not inherit a legacy stack.
• Access to best-in-class data provider feeds and a budget to support tooling and infrastructure.
• A collaborative environment where data is genuinely valued - not used to post-hoc justify decisions already made.
• Flexible/hybrid working arrangements.

To apply, please submit your CV alongside either a cover letter or a short portfolio example demonstrating a piece of analysis or tool you have built - ideally something that shows both statistical thinking and engineering execution. Shortlisted candidates will be invited to complete a take-home task using an open football dataset, followed by a technical interview and a stakeholder presentation round.

Leyton Orient FC is an equal opportunities employer. We welcome applications from all backgrounds and are committed to building a diverse team.

Leyton Orient Football Club | Brisbane Road, Leyton, London E10 5NE