Data Scientist (Operational Domain Intelligence) in Oxford

Oxa is enabling the transition to self-driving vehicles through an initial focus on the most commercially advanced sector; the autonomous shuttling of goods and people. We are home to some of the world’s leading experts on autonomous vehicles, creating solutions such as Oxa Driver, equipping vehicles with full self-driving functionality; Oxa MetaDriver, using Generative AI to accelerate and assure the safety of deployments; and Oxa Hub, a set of cloud-based offerings for autonomous fleet management. Our technology is being deployed across the UK and the U.S, and we’re partnering with a fast-growing ecosystem of operators, vehicle OEMs and equipment makers serving autonomous transportation globally as it advances.

Based in Oxford, and with offices in Canada and the U.S, Oxa was founded in 2014 and is growing rapidly (350+ 'Oxbots' to date). Our purpose is to change the way the Earth moves, through an uncompromising focus on safety, efficiency and explainability of our AI approaches. The company has attracted $225 million from leading investors so far, with $140 million raised in the last Series C funding round in January 2023.

Your Team: Oxa Foundry is a suite of tools that combines generative AI, digital twins and simulation to accelerate machine learning and testing of self-driving technology before and during real-world use. Tools within Oxa Foundry are also unlocking new opportunities to launch innovative solutions for industries such as commercial fleet insurance and risk management. Leveraging Oxa's experience of deploying AVs and establishing capabilities to safely scale (by identifying, quantifying and managing route risk with limited or no pre-existing data), we are helping organisations in those markets augment and generate new data to develop transformative fleet risk management solutions for their own customers.

Your team will ensure the company has enough data of the right kind and the right time from the right sources to sustain rapid improvement across all its tools. It will ensure suitable data ownership across our own fleet and via our customers and partners using data synthesis and expansion, simulation, automatic annotation and logging where appropriate.

Your Role: Researching and developing state of the art pipelines for:

• analysing deployment domains
• route feasibility checks
• domain clustering and classification
• representation learning and data coverage analysis

Research and development with foundational models for data generation and understanding. Responsible for data interpretation, data governance, communicating findings from the validation, and creating dashboards for metrics management. Contributing to the creation of appropriate data tools that support, amplify, and accelerate our scaling of our system for development, testing, and commercial requirements. Contributing to the effort in making sure the right data is available at the right time across our technology platform, for our deployments while in use with customers and partners. Working with other teams and leads in facilitating the creation of specialist tooling and process supporting the company wide data-agenda in both the data team and in specialist teams. Keeping up with the latest advances in computer vision and tracking research and applying relevant techniques to Oxa MetaDriver. Contributing to the backlog items that the team manages. Contributing to regular stand ups, team meetings, and 1-2-1's as part of your role.

Requirements: What you need to succeed:

• Experience with Machine Learning in a research environment.
• Demonstrate proficiency in Python software development skills.
• Experience working with LLMs, VLM and other large scale models.
• Solid software engineering design principles and up-to-date knowledge of Python best practices.
• An ability to understand both technical and commercial requirements.
• Statistical analysis, introspection and validation on large datasets.

Extra Kudos if you have:

• Experience with efficiently benchmarking and validating synthetic data.
• Machine Learning skills for data amplification and synthesis.
• Familiarity with cloud platforms, preferably Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
• Experience with computer vision and robotics, more specifically object detection, tracking and localization.
• Experience in the insurance sector.
• Experience with MLOps.
• Experience working with driving simulators, autonomous driving software, or traffic modelling.
• Familiarity with C or C++.

The Candidate Journey: Multi-Step and Two-Way. No-one wants to feel like a square peg in a round hole, so this process is designed to give you every chance to get the measure of us, and us of you. The various stages give you every opportunity to show your unique strengths and qualities, and enables each of us to establish if we’re a good fit for the other. If the fit is good and you’re selected, you’re then in a position to do great work and thrive, which is what everyone wants.

Benefits: We provide:

• Competitive salary, benchmarked against the market and reviewed annually.
• Company share programme.
• Hybrid and/or flexible work arrangements.
• Core benefits of market leading private healthcare, life assurance, critical illness cover, income protection, alongside a company paid health cash plan (including gym discounts).
• A flexible £2,000 (pro-rata) benefits fund to spend on additional benefits of your choice, including tech scheme and cycle to work benefits.
• A salary exchange pension plan.
• 25 days' annual leave plus bank holidays.
• A pet-friendly office environment.
• Safe assigned spaces for team members with individual and diverse needs.

Our Culture: Diversity is a marathon not a sprint! It is a journey with no destination. We are on a mission to unlock the benefits of self-driving technology to every person and organisation on the planet. We are creating an environment where everyone, from any background, can do their best work which put simply is the right thing to do. We hire and nurture those we can learn from, valuing diversity and the innovation that this drives. We apply a neuro inclusive lens to our recruitment process and want each potential Oxbot to enjoy the best experience possible for them. We promote an open and inclusive culture that empowers our Oxbots to bring their whole, authentic selves to work every day. Oxa is proud to be an inclusive organisation and, as such, we require all team members within our recruitment process to understand and deploy best practices focused on de-biasing the whole recruitment cycle. Please share with us any individual needs or reasonable adjustments we may need to make in advance of commencing the interview process with us.

Why become an Oxbot? Our team of experts in computer science, AI, robotics and machine learning is world-class, and together they’re solving the most exciting and important technological challenges of our times. But as well as smarts, Oxbots have heart. Our diverse, multi-cultural crew is guided by a shared vision to bring the myriad benefits of autonomy to our customers and partners. And in a company that celebrates uniqueness as much as skill and experience, they do it with energy, conviction and a healthy dose of excitement, too. If you are bold, creative and hyper skilled, come and create the future of autonomy with us at Oxa.