Lead Data Scientist in Stockport

Founding Data Science Lead — (remote-first)

Confidential search · pre-Series A AI platform · live Fortune 500 traction

Three billion people now ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Google’s AI Overviews every month what to buy, where to book and which brand is best. Our client is the AI platform that helps the world’s biggest CPG brands measure, control and grow how they show up in those answers — and automates the actions that actually move sales.

This is not a pitch deck. They have paying enterprise customers live today (think household-name CPG, the kind whose logos are on every supermarket shelf), a strategic partnership in flight with a top-tier global consultancy, and founders with a prior MarTech exit track record on the commercial side and a scaled-platform principal-engineer pedigree on the technical side.

We’re hiring the founding Data Science Lead .

You’ll own: ranking, semantic search and recommendation systems; LLM behaviour modelling across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and AI Overviews; confidence scoring and generative-feedback evaluation of LLM outputs; the signal → action pipeline (turning unstructured content from Reddit, reviews, PDPs, YouTube and social into ranked, revenue-driving recommendations); entity resolution across Brand / Product-SKU / Retailer; knowledge graph (Neo4j / Neptune) + vector search (pgvector / Pinecone / Qdrant); and the full production ML lifecycle — including LoRA fine-tuning and RLHF / DPO alignment.

What we’re looking for: 5+ years shipping production ML with measurable commercial impact; deep NLP, search / recommendation and retrieval experience; hands-on with modern LLM techniques; comfort with vector databases, knowledge graphs and messy multi-source data; early-stage temperament (no playbook, high autonomy, builder energy); and technical leadership that doesn’t rely on the org chart.

You’ll report to the CTO, work directly with the CEO, and set the ML foundations that thousands of brands will rely on to win in AI-driven discovery. Remote-first ideally from Portugal or the UK but flexible.

Pre-Series A, founding-team equity, a defined path to outcome.