Senior Data Scientist

Job Reference: Req no 19738
Band: D
SDD24
Salary: £49,500 - £72,900 depending on relevant skills, knowledge and experience.
Contract type: 10 Month Fixed Term Contract
Location: Office Base is Newcastle, This is a hybrid role and the successful candidate will balance office working with home working.

We’re happy to discuss flexible working. Please indicate your choice under the flexible working question in the application. There is no obligation to raise this at the application stage but if you wish to do so, you are welcome to. Flexible working will be part of the discussion at offer stage.

Excellent career progression – the BBC offers great opportunities for employees to seek new challenges and work in different areas of the organisation.

Unrivalled training and development opportunities – our in-house Academy hosts a wide range of internal and external courses and certification.

Benefits - We offer a negotiable salary package, a flexible 35-hour working week for work-life balance and 25 days annual leave with the option to buy an extra 5 days, a defined pension scheme and discounted dental, health care and gym.

If you need to discuss adjustments or access requirements for the interview process please contact the reasonable.adjustments@bbc.co.uk. For any general queries, please contact: bbchr@bbc.co.uk.
Freelancers are eligible to apply for an internal role if they are on a Worker Contract and they have worked continuously for 6 months. If they have worked for less than 6 months continuously or have a break of 3 weeks or more between engagements, they must seek Divisional HR approval to apply for an internal role prior to submitting an application.

Job Introduction

The BBC has been serving audiences online for more than 20 years. Across key products including BBC iPlayer, News, Sport, Weather and Sounds, we entertain, educate and inform audiences in their millions every day.

But behind the scenes we have work to do. We are making the shift from being a broadcaster that speaks to our audiences to becoming a service that is directly shaped by them and designed around their wants and needs. We are creating personalised content, products and services that bring the right content, to the right people, at the right time: a personalised BBC. This will be our greatest leap since iPlayer, and that’s why it’s right at the top of our agenda.

At the BBC we see data science as fundamental on that journey. We use data and machine learning to enrich our content, improve journalist workflows and power personalised experiences for millions of audience members.

To help drive this effort, we’re looking for a Senior Data Scientist to join the Content Discovery (Search) team as a 10-month fixed-term contract parental leave cover position. The successful candidate will provide technical expertise to this team across several exciting projects, including developing end-to-end data science products improving the relevance of our search engine results.

We are a friendly and supportive team, and we love that we get to work on interesting and important problems that have a real impact on millions of audience members.

Interview Process

There is a 2-stage process:

1. Hiring manager screening call covering role background and candidate motivations for applying (external applicants only).
2. 1.5 hour panel interview including a technical presentation from the candidate and role relevant competency based questions.

Key Responsibilities and Accountabilities

As a Senior Data Scientist, you will work hands-on to deliver value to BBC audiences by developing data science products at scale. We are looking for ‘T-shaped’ individuals, combining a breadth of knowledge with deep specialism in one or two areas.

You will be a senior contributor in a cross-functional team to build machine learning products to improve the quality of search experience across the BBC and to create a data-driven culture within the team.

Senior Data Scientists at the BBC are expected to have an impact both within their immediate team and across the wider BBC data science community, shaping technical direction, culture and ways of working. We’d love to see enthusiasm about sharing your knowledge and guiding others.

Knowledge, Skills, Training & Experience

Essential criteria:

• Extensive hands-on experience in data science and machine learning.
• Strong coding skills in Python.
• Proven track record contributing to technical machine learning projects.
• Ability to clearly communicate to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Ability to work effectively in a cross-functional team.

Desirable experience:

• Cloud services, ideally AWS.
• MLOps, e.g. model deployment, versioning and monitoring.
• Experience working on ML projects from inception to delivery, working with engineers to put models into production.
• Knowledge and understanding of best practices such as testing, code management and deployment.
• Working with large language models.
• Mentorship of more junior colleagues.

You are encouraged to apply even if you don’t meet every one of the criteria above! You’ll find above some of the skills and experience we expect from a Senior Data Scientist. Please do not think you have to tick all boxes: you will be working in a supportive and collaborative team, where we aim to put everyone in the condition to contribute at their best, and feel that their work is useful and valued. Besides, you will find great development and learning opportunities to support your professional growth.

About the BBC

The BBC is committed to redeploying employees seeking suitable alternative employment within the BBC for different reasons and they will be given priority consideration ahead of other applicants. Priority consideration means for those employees seeking redeployment their application will be considered alongside anyone else at risk of redundancy, prior to any individuals being considered who are not at risk.

We don’t focus simply on what we do – we also care how we do it. Our values and the way we behave are important to us. Please make sure you’ve read about our values and behaviours.

Diversity matters at the BBC. We have a working environment where we value and respect every individual's unique contribution, enabling all of our employees to thrive and achieve their full potential. We want to attract the broadest range of talented people to be part of the BBC – whether that’s to contribute to our programming or our wide range of non-production roles. The more diverse our workforce, the better able we are to respond to and reflect our audiences in all their diversity.

We are committed to equality of opportunity and welcome applications from individuals, regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, socio-economic background, religion and/or belief. We will consider flexible working requests for all roles, unless operational requirements prevent otherwise.

To find out more about Diversity and Inclusion at the BBC, please click here.

DISCLAIMER

This job description is a written statement of the essential characteristics of the job, with its principal accountabilities, incorporating a note of the skills, knowledge and experience required for a satisfactory level of performance. This is not intended to be a complete, detailed account of all aspects of the duties involved.