Senior Data Scientist (12 month FTC)

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Package Description

Job Reference: 19739
Band: D
Salary: up to £68,500 depending on relevant skills, knowledge and experience. The expected salary range for this role reflects internal benchmarking and external market insights.
Contract type: Fixed Term Contract: 12 months (parental leave cover)
Location: London, Glasgow, Salford or 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.

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.

At the BBC, we see AI and data science as fundamental on that journey. We use these technologies 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 Publishing Data Science team as a 12-month fixed term contract parental leave cover position. The successful candidate will help to provide technical leadership to this team across several exciting projects, working with editorial colleagues to build AI for content production.

Interview Process

2 interviews:
- Hiring manager screening call covering motivations for applying
- 1.5 hour technical presentation and behavioural interview covering relevant competencies for the role

Main Responsibilities

As a Senior Data Scientist, you will work hands-on to deliver value to BBC audiences by developing machine learning products at scale. We are looking for individuals who combine a breadth of knowledge with deep specialism in one or two areas.

You will be a senior contributor in a highly cross-functional team, working to build machine learning products end to end. Recent projects include:
• Fine-tuning and deploying open-source large language models on use cases that assist journalists and build audience engagement.
• Developing and deploying ML models to generate article metadata and improve the workflows of hundreds of journalists worldwide.
• Working with news editors to develop ML solutions that improve content discoverability for BBC front pages.

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: setting technical best practice, mentoring junior colleagues and shaping culture and ways of working.

Are you the right candidate

Essential criteria:
• Extensive hands-on experience in data science and machine learning.
• Strong coding skills, ideally in Python.
• Proven track record contributing to or leading on 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:
• Working with large language models.
• Cloud services, ideally AWS.
• MLOps, e.g. model deployment, versioning and monitoring.
• Software engineering best practices such as testing and code management and deployment.
• Delivering ML projects end-to-end and working with engineers to put models into production.
• Mentorship of more junior colleagues.

You are encouraged to apply even if you don't meet every one of the criteria above!

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 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.