Senior Data Scientist - (Clinical Trial Recruitment)

Our Future Health is an ambitious collaboration between the public, charity and private sectors, designed to help people live healthier lives for longer through better prevention, earlier detection and improved treatment of diseases. We will speed up the discovery of new methods of early disease detection, and the evaluation of new diagnostic tools, to help identify and treat diseases early, when outcomes are usually better. With over 2.5M volunteers across the UK, we are now the world’s biggest health research programme of its kind, and our volunteer group is also more diverse than other, similar health research programmes. Technology and data are central to our mission.

Through our newly launched Clinical Research Recruitment Service, we enable clinical research teams to find the right participants, faster. As this service grows, we have an opportunity to transform proven, expert-led recruitment workflows into scalable technology that enhances, rather than replaces, clinical judgement. Our ambition is to deliver increasingly seamless recruitment experiences for customers by building data-led capabilities that capture what works best today and make it repeatable, reliable, and scalable tomorrow.

In the near term, this means building better data foundations and tools that support expert-led recruitment as it works today. As we learn what can be reliably standardised, these capabilities will increasingly support more streamlined and self-service ways of working for customers.

Senior Data Scientist role: You will help turn this ambition into reality by shaping the data foundations and technical capabilities we build. You will bring a strong understanding of clinical recruitment workflows and apply it to the design of data products, analytical services, and enabling infrastructure. Working closely with engineers, scientific and operational experts, you will help guide how our recruitment technology evolves, ensuring it delivers immediate value while positioning us for long-term scale.

Responsibilities:

• Work closely with science, data and engineering teams to understand how recruitment feasibility and cohort selection are delivered in practice, and how customers engage with these outputs.
• Translate existing recruitment workflows into clear data and technical requirements, supporting engineers to build capabilities that reflect operational and user needs.
• Contribute to the development of data products and services that underpin recruitment delivery, from internal tools used by expert teams to capabilities that may later support customer-facing workflows.
• Build and maintain production-quality code, with a focus on trust, transparency, and fitness for use in a regulated environment.
• Support early prototyping and iterative delivery, using hands-on experience to inform what is ready to be standardised, automated, or scaled.
• Define and document data requirements and pipeline logic, assumptions, and quality checks, ensuring outputs remain reliable, interpretable and auditable as usage grows.
• Collaborate with governance, privacy, and compliance colleagues to embed ethical, regulatory, and data protection requirements into how data is used and shared.
• Share insights from delivery, customer interactions, and data usage to inform priorities and sequencing as recruitment technology evolves.

Qualifications:

• Significant experience applying data science or advanced analytics within health, life sciences, or clinical research contexts.
• Strong understanding of clinical research recruitment, feasibility assessment, or cohort identification workflows.
• Experience working with real-world health or clinical datasets (e.g., electronic health records, registries, or research cohorts).
• Ability to translate clinical and operational requirements into clear analytical and technical approaches.
• Experience collaborating with software engineers on production systems, including designing data pipelines or services.
• Strong programming skills (Python preferred; SQL and version control) with the ability to write maintainable, auditable production code.
• Familiarity with regulated data environments and awareness of ethical, privacy and compliance requirements.
• Experience in or alongside CROs, digital CROs, clinical research organisations, or clinical technology companies is desirable.
• Comfortable with ambiguous problem spaces where requirements emerge through delivery and iteration.
• Clear communication of complex concepts to technical and non-technical audiences and ability to collaborate across teams.
• Pragmatic, collaborative, and motivated by real-world impact.

Hiring Process:

• Initial chat with our Talent team (30 minutes).
• First interview with Head of Data Operations (25 minutes).
• Technical interview with 2-3 tech and data team members (60 minutes) including a short task.
• Final stage competency interview (60 minutes) with a cross-functional panel.

Benefits:

• Competitive base salary from £75,000.
• Generous pension scheme with employer contributions up to 12%.
• 30 days holiday pro rata + bank holidays.
• Enhanced parental leave.
• Cycle to work scheme.
• Home & tech savings through salary sacrifice.
• EV scheme discount on new electric vehicles.
• £1,000 employee referral bonus.
• Wellbeing support including Mental Health First Aiders and 24/7 online GP services.
• Flexible and remote working arrangements with a central London office in Holborn.

Join us – let’s prevent disease together. We may close postings early due to high volumes of applications. We recognise and welcome applicants from diverse backgrounds and encourage adjustments for applicants who require them. If you require any reasonable adjustments, please email talent@ourfuturehealth.org.uk.