Senior Data Scientist

Job Details

Job Title: Senior Data Scientist
 
JOB BAND: D
CONTRACT TYPE: Permanent, Full-time 
DEPARTMENT: BBC Product Group, Authoring & Curation, Content Creation AI
LOCATION: London / Newcastle / Salford / Glasgow – Hybrid 
SALARY RANGE: £57,000 - £67,000 depending on relevant skills, knowledge and experience. The expected salary range for this role reflects internal benchmarking and external market insights.

We're happy to discuss flexible working. If you'd like to, please indicate your preference in the application – though there's no obligation to do so now. Flexible working will be part of the discussion at offer stage. 

Purpose Of The Role

At the BBC, Data Science is fundamental on our journey towards being a digital-first platform, creating personalised content and products that bring the right content, to the right people, at the right time.

As a Senior Data Scientist in the Content Creation AI team within Authoring & Curation, you will be working with journalists and editors to improve workflows, enabling them to better produce, describe and curate content that serves the needs of our audience.

Why Join The Team

By joining the Content Creation AI team you will be joining a growing, cross-functional team. You’ll work with engineers, user researchers and a product manager to identify and prioritise user needs in authoring and curation workflows, building and testing proof of concepts, and then deploying solutions for integration with user-facing tools.

Your Key Responsibilities And Impact

• The role of Senior Data Scientist at the BBC is hands-on: you’ll use your technical skills to deliver value to internal stakeholders within authoring and curation.  We are looking for individuals who value both breadth and depth of knowledge.
• Senior Data Scientists at the BBC are expected to have impact within their immediate team and across the wider BBC.  Working with engineers, you’ll be instrumental in developing and supporting AI products at scale.
• You will become a key contributor within a fully cross-functional team, providing evidence to the product manager for project prioritisation, exploring proof of concepts and testing them with journalists and editorial stakeholders.
• You’ll collaborate closely with user researchers in initial discovery phases to identify opportunities for where data science can be used, exploiting your knowledge of different AI approaches.
• You’ll have the opportunity to get involved with the wider data science community, both at the BBC and externally.   Sharing your knowledge, especially with the other disciplines in the team, is vital and we love to see enthusiasm about sharing your knowledge and growing others.

Your Skills And Experience

ESSENTIAL CRITERIA

• Strong understanding of data science and machine learning techniques, including best practices, recent advances and their applications for implementation in a production environment.
• Knowledge of working with cloud services and the main challenges involved.
• Demonstrable understanding of how to evaluate algorithms and a proven track record of delivering value in production.
• Good general coding skills, particularly in Python (including code management and deployment).
• Collaboration: an ability to contribute effectively in a cross-functional team, clearly communicate with technical and non-technical audiences and listen to others’ ideas and build on them. 
   

DESIRED:

• Experience and understanding of LLMs; and an awareness of how to integrate them into data science products is also beneficial.
• Experience in putting models into production, including the use of model registries, CI/CD pipelines and software engineering best practices.  An awareness of production considerations when evaluating which model to put into production.
• Experience of monitoring models in production.
• Experience of working in an Agile framework.
   

If you can bring some of these skills and experience, along with transferable strengths, we would love to hear from you and encourage you to apply.