Senior Data Scientist in Salford

Naimuri is offering the chance to help make the UK a safer place through innovation. We partner with government and law enforcement on some of the most challenging data and technology problems out there, and we're looking for a Senior Data Scientist to join our mission. We strongly encourage candidates of all different backgrounds and identities to apply. We are committed to building an inclusive, safe and supportive environment that allows everyone to do their best work. We are happy to support any accessibility or neurodiversity requirements that you may need during the recruitment process.

About us: We’ve been around for about ten years and grown from being a little‑known tech start‑up to creating our own community at the heart of Manchester’s thriving tech ecosystem. The name Naimuri is Japanese and simply means… This principle guides everything we do, from our technology and processes to our people and culture. We empower our teams to do what they think is right, giving them the confidence to explore new ways of working and deliver the finest solutions in an agile, bias‑free environment. Our business is focused on four cornerstones: Wellbeing, Empowerment, Perpetual Edge and Delivery. People and culture are at the heart of Naimuri, so that collectively, we can realise our mission of ‘making the UK a safer place to be’.

About the team: The Data capability team at Naimuri offers a unique opportunity to apply your skills to impactful projects. It's a rapidly growing, collaborative, and supportive environment where we analyse and investigate data, design solutions to exciting data‑driven challenges, and make a real difference for our customers. We are passionate about continuous learning and fostering shared expertise within the team.

• Analysing customer requirements in long‑term projects and new bid work to uncover opportunities for customers to leverage their data.
• Analysing and modelling customer data, performing statistical analyses, designing cleansing, transformation and normalisation processes, performing feature extraction/reduction, and designing solutions and opportunities.
• Performing, visualising, and presenting data analyses and analytics to customers and project leads, including on‑site.
• Engineering platforms, databases, and data pipelines as part of broader delivery solutions.
• Training (inc. transfer learning and feature extraction) and deploying ML/AI models for prediction, detection, classification, etc.
• Writing or supporting software solutions that implement data science models, tools, and techniques.

About the role: As a Senior Data Scientist, you will help maintain our strong reputation for delivering robust solutions by taking a conscientious and scientific approach to customer data. You will use your strong problem‑solving skills to design and develop innovative techniques and tools in an agile manner. Working collaboratively with other data scientists, engineers, and developers, you will research, experiment, analyse and visualise complex data, presenting your findings to customers and colleagues. A key part of this role is mentoring and supporting earlier‑career colleagues, helping to foster a culture of continuous learning and shared expertise across the team.

You will work closely with customers, other data scientists, data architects, data engineers, software developers, and testers to:

• Investigate, transform (with provenance), and model customer data, and potentially create synthetic data in lieu.
• Apply statistical methods to analyse customer data and be able to report that analysis to co‑workers, customers, and project leads.
• Identify opportunities to apply, design and build algorithms to transform and interrogate data.
• Visualise and communicate data and model and algorithm outputs for audiences of different levels of understanding.
• Use data science techniques, including ML/AI, to design and build solutions to customer problems, and work with software developers, data engineers and testers to implement and assure them.
• Work with data engineers and platform engineers to design, implement and test data ingest pipelines.
• Work with other data scientists and ML and platform engineers to design, train, test and deploy ML/AI models.
• Test and compare the effectiveness of different mathematical and computational techniques for working with data.
• Conduct research into the application or development of new data science techniques, potentially collaborating with our expansive academic network, and co‑supervising Masters and PhD candidates.
• Experiment design and execution/running, and communication of the experiment plan.

About you We’re looking for someone who:

• Has significant industry experience as a data scientist and is passionate about data, with opinions on the best ways of working, techniques, and tooling.
• Has experience leading a team or project and wants to help others develop and learn.
• Takes a conscientious, curious, and scientific approach to their work.
• Continually learning about state‑of‑the‑art techniques in technology, academic, and industry articles.
• Possesses strong analytical problem‑solving abilities to design and develop innovative data science solutions.
• Can communicate and present complex ideas and findings to diverse audiences, including customers, executives, and non‑specialists.
• Has performed deep dives into data and presented the results of analysis and modelling using tools like Jupyter Notebooks.
• Has experience designing and developing data ingestion and transformation pipelines in languages like Python, potentially using cloud solutions in AWS, Azure, or GCP.
• Is familiar with the full lifecycle of ML/AI models, including collating training data, design, training, evaluation, and deploying automated pipelines.
• Has experience helping to transform or implement an organisation’s data science strategy.
• Is comfortable designing and executing experiment plans and communicating them to stakeholders.

Nice to haves:

• Experience with any of the following specialisms: Data Synthesis, Test and Evaluation, AI Assurance, Knowledge Graphs and Ontologies, Data Governance and Compliance, or Deepfake Detection.
• Creating Python‑based applications and/or APIs.
• A degree in a field like data science, physics, computational science, mathematics, or statistics (though we value demonstrable experience just as much!).

Location: Our Head Office is based in Salford Quays, Manchester, with satellite teams currently in London and Gloucestershire. We offer hybrid working where you can work from home for part of your working week with time on site being based on the needs of your assigned delivery and agreed Ways of Working for your team. This would normally be a maximum of one or two days per week but you would be welcome to spend more days in the office if you preferred.

Pay and benefits: Naimuri pays competitively within the industry based on your role’s base location rates. The salary for this position is dependent upon your experience. We assess seniority relative to the team at Naimuri during the interviewing process. A full time working week is 37.5 hours and you have flexibility over when you give that time. We also offer part‑time working which can be discussed during the recruitment process. Our core hours are 10:00am - 3:00pm and our office hours are between 7:30 and 18:00 Monday to Friday.

Benefits include:

• Flexible/Hybrid working options
• A company performance related bonus
• Pension matched 1.5x up to 10.5%
• AXA group 1 medical cover
• Personal training budget
• Holiday buy‑back scheme
• A flexible benefits scheme

Recruitment Process: We want to ensure that you feel comfortable and confident when interviewing with us. To help you prepare, our recruitment team will discuss the process in more detail with you when you apply. We are happy to support any accessibility or neurodiversity requirements.