- Company Name
- Virgin
- Job Title
- Lead Data Scientist
- Job Description
-
**Job title:** Lead Data Scientist
**Role Summary:**
Lead the design, development, and deployment of machine‑learning and AI‑driven data products, ensuring technical excellence, scalability, and business impact. Act as the day‑to‑day technical authority, mentor junior scientists, and champion a data‑driven culture.
**Expectations:**
* Deliver high‑quality, production‑ready models that drive revenue and pricing strategies.
* Maintain rigorous standards for model reliability, reproducibility, and ethical use.
* Collaborate across product, pricing, and engineering teams to translate data insights into actionable business decisions.
**Key Responsibilities:**
* Architect, implement, and optimize ML and optimisation models, including pricing, recommendation, and predictive systems.
* Lead a small team of data scientists, providing technical guidance, code reviews, and career development.
* Oversee end‑to‑end MLOps pipeline: model training, deployment, monitoring, and lifecycle management on cloud platforms (AWS or equivalent).
* Partner with Data Product Owners and business stakeholders to define model requirements and evaluate performance against business KPIs.
* Design experiments, analyze results, and communicate findings through storytelling to non‑technical audiences.
* Foster a culture of experimentation, rigorous testing, and knowledge sharing across the data community.
**Required Skills:**
* Proven experience in revenue management, dynamic pricing, or related optimisation domains.
* Advanced proficiency in Python, SQL, and data‑engineering tools; clean, maintainable code is essential.
* Deep knowledge of modern ML techniques: time‑series forecasting, regression, supervised/unsupervised learning, and mathematical optimisation.
* Hands‑on MLOps expertise (model deployment, A/B testing, monitoring, and versioning).
* Strong cloud skills (AWS services such as SageMaker, Lambda, S3, etc.).
* Ability to work with large, noisy datasets and make sound data‑driven decisions.
* Excellent communication, storytelling, and leadership abilities.
* Familiarity with recommender systems, personalisation, and generative AI is a plus.
**Required Education & Certifications:**
* Master’s degree or higher in Computer Science, Data Science, Statistics, Operations Research, or a related quantitative field.
* Relevant certifications (e.g., AWS Certified Machine Learning – Specialty, Certified Analytics Professional) are desirable.