Principal Data Scientist in London

At Cirium our goal is to keep the world connected. We are the industry leader in aviation analytics, helping our customers understand the past, present, and predicting what will happen tomorrow. Our mission is to transform the aviation industry by enabling airlines, airports, travel companies, tech giants, aircraft manufacturers, financial institutions and many more to accelerate their own digital transformation.

Propulsion Labs is Cirium’s innovation group, focused on solving complex, high impact problems in aviation analytics. We work in small, collaborative teams to explore ideas, test solutions, and scale products that deliver meaningful value to customers. Our environment supports autonomy, learning, and inclusive collaboration.

Our Tech Stack

• Big Data: Databricks, AWS, Snowflake, Azure
• Programming: Python, SQL, PySpark
• Frameworks: PyTorch, LangChain

About the Role

As a Principal Data Scientist, you will contribute deep technical expertise while helping shape best practices across the data science community. This is a senior individual contributor role with strong influence through mentorship, collaboration, and technical leadership. You will work closely with partners across product, engineering, and the business to design and deliver data‑driven solutions. We welcome candidates from a range of backgrounds and experiences who are excited to apply advanced analytics to real‑world problems.

Responsibilities

• Technical Leadership – Act as the go‑to expert for state‑of‑the‑art advanced analytics, machine learning, and generative AI. Define and evolve best practices for complex modeling and design problems, ensuring scalability, robustness, and performance. Provide thought leadership on emerging technologies and methodologies relevant to aviation analytics.
• Mentorship & Collaboration – Mentor and coach data scientists, fostering a culture of continuous learning and technical excellence. Collaborate closely with product managers, engineers, and domain experts to align data science initiatives with business objectives. Influence strategic decisions by translating complex technical insights into actionable recommendations.
• Hands‑On Development – Lead by example through hands‑on coding and model development. Design, prototype, and validate innovative solutions for high‑impact problems. Partner with engineering teams to deploy models into production environments.
• Domain Expertise – Leverage deep knowledge of aviation, travel, or related industries to inform modeling approaches and deliver customer‑centric solutions. Stay ahead of industry trends impacting data‑driven products.

Requirements

• Data Mastery – Comfortable working with large, complex, real‑world datasets, preferably aviation‑related. Expertise in data wrangling, feature engineering, and scalable data pipelines.
• Outstanding Depth Experience – At least one area of deep expertise, with experience across several of the following (in approximate order of relevance): Predictive modeling over tabular data, deep learning, NLP + LLMs, generative AI agent pipelines, simulations, graph‑based models, time‑series forecasting, geospatial modeling, causal inference, reinforcement learning, optimization problems, and/or anomaly detection.
• Deployment Experience – Proven track record of deploying or partnering on customer‑facing production machine learning systems.

Working for You

We know your well‑being and happiness are key to a long and successful career. These are some of the benefits we are delighted to offer:

• Generous holiday allowance with the option to buy additional days
• Health screening, eye care vouchers and private medical benefits
• Well‑being programs
• Life assurance
• Access to a competitive contributory pension scheme
• Save As You Earn share option scheme
• Travel season ticket loan
• Electric vehicle scheme
• Optional dental insurance
• Maternity, paternity and shared parental leave
• Employee assistance programme

We are an equal opportunity employer: qualified applicants are considered for and treated during employment without regard to race, color, creed, religion, sex, national origin, citizenship status, disability status, protected veteran status, age, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by law.