Senior Data Scientist, SCI in Plymouth

As a Senior Data Scientist on the Surfline Coastal Intelligence (SCI) team, you will play a central role in developing the next generation of coastal monitoring and prediction technology. Your focus will be on applying advanced computer vision (CV) methods to our global camera network and integrating these outputs with physical, hydrodynamic, and statistical modeling to deliver actionable insights for coastal managers, engineers, and public safety agencies. You’ll contribute to our technical roadmap, own the delivery of high‑value modeling and CV initiatives, and collaborate deeply with data science, engineering, and product teams. This role requires strong analytical and quantitative skills, creativity in solving open‑ended problems, and the ability to build production‑ready models that perform in challenging real‑world environments. Under Surfline’s "Work from Anywhere" policy, this position may be performed from anywhere in the UK.

What You’ll Do

• Prototype and validate new coastal monitoring capabilities, contributing directly to SCI’s R&D roadmap in collaboration with our Data Science, Engineering, and Product teams.
• Conduct hypothesis‑driven experiments, including feature engineering, model evaluation, and validation against ground‑truth datasets (e.g., lidar, surveys, tide gauges, and sensor networks).
• Work cross‑functionally with SCI stakeholders to ensure model outputs meet operational accuracy and delivery requirements for government and enterprise customers.
• Communicate directly with customers where necessary to gather requirements throughout the product lifecycle.

What We’re Looking For

• Extensive experience working with Python in research and production environments.
• Delivery‑oriented, able to lead and execute modeling efforts from start to finish.
• Thorough understanding of the challenges of building ML pipelines with large datasets and taking them from R&D into production.
• A communicative, personable team player who can build trust, influence stakeholders, and work directly with customers when needed.
• A genuine enthusiasm for protecting and enhancing coastlines worldwide.

Not sure if you meet all the requirements? Even if your experience looks a bit different, if you think you’d be a great fit for the role, we’d love to hear from you.

You May Also Have

• A passion for surfing, ocean activities, or outdoor recreation.

About Surfline Wavetrak: Millions of people around the world depend on Surfline Wavetrak’s products to enrich their experiences in and around the ocean. Since 1985, our company has connected people with the ocean. Starting with surfers and expanding to offshore cruisers, anglers and a myriad of other ocean enthusiasts, we’ve made it our mission to deliver peak maritime experiences. We provide those who work and play in the ocean with all the advanced tools, personalised insights and immersive content to make their lives better – supplying them with the information they need to make smarter decisions, seek out new experiences and gain valuable knowledge. We are dedicated to bringing people together across the globe, and we champion and encourage those who bring different perspectives, ideas, and creativity. At Surfline Wavetrak, we recruit, employ, train, compensate, and promote regardless of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, disability, gender identity, gender expression, age, veteran status, and any other protected status.