Lead Data Scientist in London

We are seeking a highly skilled and innovative Lead Data Scientist to join our Recommendations team within Customer Data Science. You will be the technical lead of the team building the next generation of personalised product recommendations, outfit suggestions, and our AI Stylist conversational experiences, to help millions of users find products that they will love. Your work will directly drive higher customer satisfaction, conversion rates, and commercial impact as part of M&S's digital transformation. This is a high impact hands-on IC role, responsible for defining the technical strategy, implementation and delivery of many of our key online personalised experiences.

What You'll do:

• IC tech leadership: design, build, test, evaluate, deploy, and monitor machine learning and AI solutions in production, ensuring they are robust, scalable, and aligned to business needs. Includes retrieval, ranking, recommender systems and LLM-based components powering conversational experiences.
• Developing the team: mentoring and coaching 5 data scientists, creating a high-performing team culture with strong technical standards.
• Collaboration: with cross-functional partners (Product, Engineering, Design, Delivery) and online business stakeholders to identify opportunities and deliver impactful customer experiences.
• Building reusable capabilities: identify opportunities to abstract common logic, modules, and functionality across multiple use cases, and convert them into reusable core components, frameworks, and assets.
• Technical direction and standards: champion best practices in exploratory analysis, experimentation, model development, evaluation, coding standards, testing, documentation, monitoring, and productionisation.

Who you are:

• Your skills and experience will include a proven track record as a tech lead of a team owning ML/AI problems end-to-end, including LLM based solutions - from framing and modelling through to production deployment, monitoring, and continuous improvement - delivering measurable business impact.
• You define and instil in the team strong software engineering principles to build robust, scalable ML systems, taking responsibility for performance and reliability in production rather than handing off.
• Strong systems and architectural experience - identifying repeatable patterns across use cases and abstracting them into reusable components or shared capabilities that improve the scalability and effectiveness of our core algorithms.
• Working with large-scale datasets and distributed data processing (e.g. Spark), and with modern recommendation or personalisation systems at scale (e.g. large-scale retrieval and ranking architectures, real-time inference, vector representations, approximate nearest neighbour search).
• Communication skills: strong ability to communicate complex technical concepts, recommendations, and trade-offs clearly and effectively to both technical and non-technical audiences, including senior stakeholders.

What's in it for you:

• Being a part of M&S is exactly that - playing your part to bring the magic of M&S to our customers every day.
• We're an inclusive, dynamic, exciting, and ever evolving business built on doing the right thing and bringing exceptional quality, value, service to every customer, whenever, wherever and however they want to shop with us.
• After completing your probationary period, you'll receive 20% colleague discount across all M&S products and many of our third-party brands for you and a member of your household.
• Competitive holiday entitlement with the potential to buy extra holiday days!
• Discretionary bonus schemes awarded based on how you achieve your personal objectives and our performance as a business.
• A generous Defined Contribution Pension Scheme and Life Assurance.
• A dedicated welcome to our teams with a tailored induction and a wide range of training programmes to develop your skills.
• Amazing perks and discounts via our M&S Choices portal to maximise your financial and personal wellbeing.
• Industry-leading parental, adoption and neonatal policies, providing support and flexibility for your family.
• Access to a fantastic range of wellbeing support for all colleagues including access to our 24/7 Virtual GP and PAM Assist to support you and your family.
• A charity volunteer day to support a charity or cause you're passionate about through a dedicated day away from work.

Everyone's welcome:

We are ambitious about the future of retail. We're disrupting, innovating and leading the industry into a more conscientious, inspiring digital era. We're transforming how we work together and offering our most exciting opportunities yet. Marks & Spencer strives to be an inclusive organisation, trusted and admired by our colleagues, customers and suppliers. Join us and make change happen. We are committed to building diverse and representative teams, where everyone can bring their whole selves to work and be at their best. We support each other and work together to win together. If you feel you'd benefit from any support or reasonable adjustments during any stage of the recruitment process, please don't hesitate to let us know when completing your application. This information will be picked up by our team, so we can try and put steps in place to help you be at your best through this process.