Principal Data Scientist

Actively seeking a Principal or Lead Data Scientist, ready to step up into a senior leadership role. Shape and guide the Data Science function, setting the strategy in partnership with the senior leadership team. Lead high-impact modelling, experimentation, and productionised ML to understand key business performance, behaviour, and customer market trends.

We are seeking a leader with high emotional intelligence, able to win the hearts and minds of internal customers and provide real value to the business as a whole. Please note this is a 5-day-a-week onsite role - core hours 10-3pm - flexibility to work from home on occasion is provided but in general this role is a fully office-based position.

Key Role Requirements

• Strategic Direction & Roadmap: Define the data science and ML roadmap in partnership with the Director of AI and Technology and wider tech leadership. Prioritise the team's model and experiment backlog by measurable business value. Translate ambiguous commercial problems into hypotheses, experiments, and ML products.
• About the Role: Design, train, evaluate, and productionise ML models across the relevant techniques (classification, regression, recommenders, LTV, uplift, sequence models, embeddings). Lead A/B automation testing and causal inference work; own statistical rigour and readouts. Ensure models are explainable, monitored, retrained on a defined cadence, and have clear ownership.
• Responsibilities: Leadership & Talent Development: Line-manage data scientists and graduate data scientists; set goals, conduct 1:1s, support career growth. Set the technical bar through code review, model review, and architecture review. Create a learning culture: paper reading, experiment write-ups, internal tech talks, Kaggle/open-source participation.
• Stakeholder Partnership & Communication: Act as the principal data science point of contact for Studio, UA, Growth, and Finance leaders. Communicate results clearly to non-technical leaders; drive decisions, not just decks. Contribute the data science view into SLT and board-level reporting where required.
• Governance, Ethics & Risk: Ensure data science work complies with privacy, security, and platform policy (GDPR, COPPA where relevant, store policy). Document model risk, bias considerations, and mitigation steps for any customer-facing model. Operate within agreed cost guardrails for compute, storage, and third-party APIs. Ad-hoc other tasks which may arise from time to time and be assigned to you by your line manager.

Qualifications: Degree in Mathematics, Physics, Statistics, Chemistry, Engineering or a related quantitative discipline. MSc or PhD is a plus.

Required Skills:

• 5+ years applied data science/ML, including 2+ years tech-leading or line-managing.
• Demonstrable track record of ML models in production delivering measurable business outcomes.
• Games, mobile, or consumer-tech experience preferred but not required.
• Expertise in Python and SQL, Cloud & Data Platforms and Data Visualisation.
• Experience in technical leadership and mentoring team members.
• Excellent communication, collaboration, and problem-solving skills.

Benefits: Generous Holiday: Start with 25 days of annual leave, plus