Data Scientist in Wilmslow

This is an exciting opportunity for a creative and commercially-minded data professional to join our growing AI & Data Science team at Citation Group.

You will use machine learning, statistical modelling, and advanced analytics to help business units across the group optimise and automate what they do. This could mean building models that predict which customers are at risk of leaving, scoring sales leads by their likelihood to convert, segmenting our customer base to personalise their experience, or analysing call transcript data to improve our sales processes.

You will join an established Data Science team that already has models running in production, a well-structured data warehouse, and the engineering support to deploy and scale what you build. This is a hands-on role where you will have ownership of the full project lifecycle; from understanding the business problem, through exploratory analysis and model development, to working with our ML Engineer to get your work into production.

Responsibilities

• Collaborating with stakeholders across the business to define and scope data science projects that solve real commercial problems.
• Conducting exploratory data analysis to uncover patterns, validate hypotheses, and drive actionable insight from complex and often messy data.
• Building and validating machine learning models that deliver continuous, automated value to the business.
• Quantifying the business impact of your work with clear business cases upfront and a process to track realised value after deployment.
• Working closely with our ML Engineer to ensure your models can be deployed, monitored, and maintained in production.
• Collaborating across the wider AI, Data, and IT teams to ensure solutions integrate smoothly with existing systems and architecture.
• Communicating findings and recommendations clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.

Example Projects

• Build and refine churn prediction models that identify customers at risk of leaving, enabling care teams to intervene before it’s too late.
• Develop lead scoring models that prioritise sales leads based on their propensity to convert, helping sales teams focus on the highest-value opportunities.
• Optimise the allocation of sales representatives to leads based on predicted conversion likelihood and rep strengths.
• Segment customers based on current and potential value to enable personalised engagement and targeted marketing.
• Design and analyse A/B tests and experiments to measure the impact of business initiatives.

About You

• Experience working in an analytical or data science role, or a postgraduate degree in Statistics, Data Science, Mathematics, Computer Science, or a related quantitative field.
• Strong proficiency in Python for data analysis and model development.
• Excellent knowledge of how to apply machine learning and statistical techniques to solve business problems such as classification, regression, clustering, and time-series forecasting.
• Experience working with large, complex, and often imperfect datasets – you’re comfortable with data wrangling and know that most of the work happens before you train a model.
• Great communication skills with the ability to explain technical concepts to a non-technical audience and translate business problems into analytical approaches.
• A commercial mindset – you care about whether your work actually makes a difference to the business, not just whether the model metrics look good.

Desirable Skills

• Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or GCP.
• Familiarity with SQL and working with data warehouses.
• Experience delivering data science solutions into production environments.
• Familiarity with MLOps practices, version control, and reproducible workflows.
• Knowledge of techniques for analysing unstructured data such as text (NLP) and an interest in how large language models are changing the field.
• Experience with experimentation design, A/B testing, or causal inference methods.
• Experience working in a commercial B2B setting.
• Experience with BI and reporting tools such as Power BI or Tableau.

The Team

You will be part of the AI & Data Science team, a multidisciplinary group that combines data science, machine learning engineering, AI implementation, and commercial expertise. The team builds and maintains models running in production, serves real business processes, and has delivered measurable impact across sales, retention, compliance, and customer experience.

Within the Data Science function, you will work alongside a Senior Data Scientist and an ML Engineer, reporting to the Head of Data Science & AI. You will also collaborate closely with AI Implementation specialists, Project Managers, and the wider Data and IT teams.

About Us

We are Citation. We are far from your average service provider. Our colleagues bring their brilliant selves to work every day and we create an environment where they can shine. The team is a nice bunch. We don’t do office politics or “that’s not my job”. We listen, support and take ownership.

We have been proudly delivering valuable HR, Health and Safety, and compliance services to SMEs across the UK for over 20 years. Passionate about service, we’re on a mission to revolutionise our colleague’s and client’s experience by employing brilliant people who are experts at what they do and smile whilst they are doing it.