Senior Data Scientist in Chester

At Forge Holiday Group, we don’t just do holidays, we create memories. With market-leading brands like Sykes Holiday Cottages, Forest Holidays, and Bachcare in New Zealand, we’re 1,700+ strong and powered by four values: One Business One Team, Keep it Simple, Grow & Learn, Sustainable Impact.

What You Need To Know:

• Salary: Up to £70,000 per annum
• Location: Chester HQ, Hybrid working
• Report To: Head of Data Science
• Team: Data Science
• Working Pattern: 37.5 hours (Monday to Friday, 9am until 5:30pm)

About the Senior Data Scientist Role:

The Senior Data Scientist is a hands-on technical role responsible for designing, building, and shipping the machine learning models that drive commercial performance across the group. This role takes business problems through the full lifecycle - framing the problem, exploring the data, building and validating models, and getting them reliably into production. The role combines deep technical delivery with clear communication, partnering with product, commercial, and engineering colleagues to make sure the work is grounded in real outcomes. We are looking for someone technically excellent and commercially aware, who writes high-quality code, makes sound modelling decisions, and helps raise the standard of how the team works.

What You'll Do:

• Build & Deliver Impactful Solution: Design, build, and ship machine learning models that address real commercial problems, taking ownership of the work from initial framing through to a validated solution in production. Work closely with product, commercial, and engineering colleagues to scope problems well, contributing technical input early so the team commits to work that is both feasible and valuable. Translate business challenges into clear data science work, defining scope, success measures, and trade-offs in plain language. Contribute to where data science can add the most value next - pricing, personalisation, forecasting, owner and guest experience, and bring strong ideas to how those problems are approached.
• Collaborate & Lead Technically: Act as a senior technical contributor, setting a high bar for code quality and modelling rigour to help shape how the team approaches its work. Communicate your work clearly: write up model behaviour and results, present in roadmap and review forums, and keep colleagues informed and confident in what the team is delivering. Mentor less experienced data scientists through code review, pairing, and technical guidance, and act as a trusted point of contact for product, engineering, and commercial colleagues working with the team.
• Run Reliable Models in Production: Keep the models you build running reliably in production: set up monitoring, alerting, and drift detection, track performance, and manage the retraining cadence that keeps them healthy. Work to and help uphold the team’s standards for code review, model documentation, reproducibility, testing, and deployment, so quality stays consistent across the function. Work with data engineering and platform teams on MLOps tooling and infrastructure, and help respond to incidents affecting live models.

What You’ll Bring:

Essential:

• Strong hands-on data science and ML experience, with the ability to design end-to-end models, write production-quality code, and make independent modelling and architecture decisions.
• Advanced Python and SQL, including pandas, scikit-learn, and XGBoost/LightGBM.
• Experience in at least two of the following: forecasting, segmentation, recommender systems, ranking, or behavioural modelling.
• Proven delivery of ML projects end to end, from problem framing and exploratory analysis to production deployment.
• Ability to translate business problems into well-scoped data science solutions, prioritising commercial impact over technical novelty.
• Strong communicator, able to explain models and insights to non-technical stakeholders across product, commercial, and engineering teams.
• Experience deploying and maintaining models (monitoring, retraining, MLOps).
• Familiar with modern tooling (cloud ML, experiment tracking, feature stores) and scalable engineering practices.

Desirable:

• Experience in travel, hospitality, marketplace, or consumer platforms.
• Familiar with pricing, demand forecasting, recommendations, or CLV modelling.
• Practical experience with LLMs, agentic AI workflows, or applied generative AI in a production setting.
• Experience with Microsoft Fabric, Azure ML, or equivalent cloud ML tools (e.g. AWS/ Azure).
• Interest in responsible AI, explainability, and governance.

Forge Holiday Group Benefits:

• Annual bonus scheme based on company performance
• 33 days’ holiday (including bank holidays), plus up to 5 extra with long service.
• Option to purchase extra holiday days if you wish.
• A day off for your birthday
• 2 volunteering days per year.
• Enhanced parental leave (24 weeks maternity, 3 weeks paternity at full pay).
• Pension scheme with employer contributions
• Discounted and last-minute stays at Forest Holidays and Sykes Cottages for you, your friends & family.
• Special offers and discounts designed to enhance your overall wellbeing.
• Health cash plan & life assurance.
• Training & development opportunities.
• 24/7 mental health support.
• On-site gym and parking at Chester HQ (near train station).
• Employee savings scheme
• Long service awards and company events

We’re committed to diversity and inclusion and encourage you to bring your authentic self. Need adjustments for recruitment? Just ask. Join us and help shape the future of data science at Forge Holiday Group.