Data Scientist & Machine Learning Researcher

Location: Gloucester, South Gloucestershire

Benefits:

• Competitive salary
• Contributory Pension Scheme (up to 10.5% company contribution)
• 6 times salary ‘Life Assurance’ with pension
• 25 days holiday (increasing with service) + statutory public holidays, plus opportunity to buy and sell up to 5 days (37hr)
• Company bonus scheme (discretionary)
• Flexible Benefits scheme with extensive salary sacrifice schemes, including Health Cashplan, Dental, and Cycle to Work among others
• Enhanced sick pay
• Enhanced family friendly policies including enhanced maternity, paternity & shared parental leave

Work Culture:

• 37hr working week, although hours may vary depending on role, job requirement or site‑specific arrangements.
• Early 1.30pm finish Friday, start your weekend early!
• Remote, hybrid and site based working opportunities, dependant on your needs and the requirements of the role.
• Up to 5 paid days volunteering each year.
• Flexible working culture focused on output, with more formal flexible working arrangements on request (assessed subject to role).

About The Role:

This role is within the Strategic Research Group (SRG). The SRG are a team of Data Science, Machine Learning and AI specialists who develop novel AI solutions to mission focused problems. In this role you will be responsible for the technical development of AI/ML projects, working alongside more senior members of the team, supporting projects from initial idea scoping right through to final project delivery both in customer and internal domains. You will demonstrate novel thinking and propose new ideas for solving challenging problems. You will communicate these ideas effectively to senior technical leaders to feed into technical direction of your projects.

Responsibilities:

• Develop novel data science solutions, contributing significantly to machine learning projects as part of a team, with some guidance and direction from seniors.
• Bring experience in developing and delivering data‑centric solutions.
• Undertake research and applied AI/ML tasks on both customer and internal research projects.
• Work with autonomy on assigned tasks within project groups.
• Generate ideas for new research directions.
• Deliver AI/ML/Data Science solutions to a broad range of problems in defence.
• Work with more senior group members, customers and internal stakeholders to determine appropriate technical approaches and do the technical development required for delivery.
• Excellent communication skills, prepared to present and undertake practical demonstrations of work internally in the team and to senior stakeholders with adaptability to audiences of different levels of technical expertise.

Essential Skills & Experience:

• BSc in Machine Learning, Data Science, Computer Science, Mathematics or related field.
• Experience coding in Python and associated ML packages (HuggingFace, TensorFlow, PyTorch).
• Have experience of delivering ML solutions to stakeholders.
• Demonstrate good understanding of AI/ML algorithms for different data types and tasks including Generative AI, NLP and computer vision, sufficient to be able to undertake research and development beyond existing literature, with some support and technical direction set by seniors.
• Experience of training and developing AI models including Large Language Models.
• Ability to produce high‑quality scientific (academic style) writing for internal & external publication.
• Problem solve with high levels of autonomy, with some input from technical leaders.
• Be a self‑starter, being pro‑active in finding solutions.

Desirable:

• PhD or Masters degree highlighting experience of academic research.
• Experience using robust ML pipelines, appropriate version control and environment management (such as venvs or Docker).
• Working knowledge of Linux systems, using basic command‑line functionality (e.g. AWS CLI, Docker CLI, Linux commands like ssh, ls, cd).
• Experience working in Cloud, especially AWS but also equivalents such as GCP or Azure.
• Research publications in peer reviewed journals.
• Comfortable following agile processes for project delivery.
• Experience of delivering AI/ML projects in defence or government.

RTX adheres to the principles of equal employment. All qualified applications will be given careful consideration without regard to ethnicity, colour, religion, gender, sexual orientation or identity, national origin, age, disability, protected veteran status or any other characteristic protected by law.