Senior Data Scientist

London

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Financial Times

News, analysis and opinion from the Financial Times on the latest in markets, economics and politics

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About Us

Here at the FT, gold-standard journalism is just the beginning. 500-people strong, our Product & Tech team keeps us ahead of the ever-changing digital landscape by delivering cutting-edge products to over one million digital subscribers every day. Our plans for growth rely on a diverse, dedicated and dynamic group of product, tech, delivery and data specialists - everyone’s welcome in this friendly, forward-thinking team. And with entrepreneurial spirit, intelligence and opportunity at every turn, there’s no limits to where your FT career will take you.

 

Our commitment to diversity and inclusion in the workplace

At the FT, we aim for employees across all regions to have a voice so that diverse perspectives are heard and valued. We believe that a supportive workplace is one where employees feel they can be themselves at work and have the flexibility they need to meet their personal needs. We'll continue to remove barriers for all, and in particular barriers facing employees from underrepresented groups.

 

Role Overview

This is a unique opportunity for someone passionate about solving problems to advance their career within data science. The senior data scientist will advise on which projects are feasible and recommend new projects based on their experience. In doing this they will build and maintain a roadmap of work for their team and form close relationships with product managers and marketing team leads. To be successful they will need strong communication skills and be able to clearly explain the models and techniques being used. We work with R, BigQuery, GitHub and some python. 

 

Collaboration is central to how we work. The senior data scientist will be responsible for mentoring data scientists and demonstrating best practice. Our teams are set up to have several data scientists working on the same project. We believe this helps us share ideas, solve problems faster and avoid bad habits. A successful senior data scientist will support and encourage this collaboration. 

 

We work on a wide range of business challenges and opportunities from across the FT. In the past these have included recommending content topics for each user based on reading behaviour, predicting which subscribers will cancel and measuring the gender balance of homepage images with facial recognition. If projects like these excite you, consider applying to join the team. 

 

What you will be responsible for:

  • Advising on feasibility of projects and recommending new data science projects and services to support business areas

  • Lead on projects and build and maintain a roadmap of data science capabilities for the team

  • Forming close relationships with a range of stakeholders

  • Building, documenting and testing machine learning pipelines

  • Applying statistical techniques to our web, subscription and content data in order to answer interesting questions and develop new models

  • Research into user behaviour helps us improve our models. We try to make sure this work is repeatable and accurate. 

  • Explaining techniques, results and ideas to colleagues, many of whom have not worked with data before

  • Advising product managers on experimental design and metrics

  • Sharing your work with the rest of the team, and reviewing the work of other team members

  • Managing and supporting the development of junior team members. This is about making the FT a great place to work and helping people learn new skills

 

Skills you need to be successful in this role:

 

Essential

  • Recent experience working with large data sets to solve complex problems

  • Substantial proficiency with R or python for data analysis and machine learning

  • Experience implementing and testing the success of machine learning and data science outputs within end user applications

  • Examples of building, deploying and testing machine learning models on production systems

  • Passion for making the complicated easy to understand, through written, verbal and visual form

  • Experience prioritising, maintaining and delivering a pipeline of competing projects 

  • A friendly and collaborative approach to the people you work with

  • Strong SQL for querying and database management

 

Extras we would be excited about

  • Experience with any of H2O, Tensorflow, Airflow, D3, RStudio Connect, Git/SVN + GitHub, R package development, CircleCI, ggplot2

  • Management or mentoring experience

  • Conversational Bulgarian (we have a tech office in Sofia that we often work with)

  • Previous work in a newsroom or media company

  • Work in agile teams or knowledge or agile methodologies

  • Masters or PhD in Maths, Statistics or similar

 

What’s in it for you? FT Benefits

Our benefits vary depending on location, but we are committed to providing best in class perks across all our offices as well as an inclusive environment to develop your career. Examples of our benefits include; extensive learning and development opportunities (e.g. training on Tableau, R, SQL, etc), generous annual leave allowances (25 days annual leave, rising to 30 + additional flexi-days), flexible working, double match pension plan (up to 12%), medical cover, enhanced maternity & paternity packages and subsidised gym memberships. Full details of our benefits can be found here.

 

How we work

We offer a strict 35 hour working week to all staff in our London office. Our hybrid setup means staff are expected to come into the office 2 days a week on average. We operate flexibly and thus this 2 day a week figure should be taken as a general ratio of the time you will spend in the office.

Our office is located across the street from St. Paul's Cathedral and is easily accessible from all corners of London. There are the main train terminals such as Liverpool Street, Moorgate, Blackfriars, City Thameslink or Waterloo all situated within walking distance or there are several tube stations within a few mins walk such as Mansion House (District or Circle line), St. Paul's (Central line), Bank (Central or Waterloo & City line) or Barbican (Central, Hammersmith & City or Metropolitan lines).


 

* Salary range is an estimate based on our AI, ML, Data Science Salary Index 💰

Tags: Agile Airflow BigQuery D3 Data analysis ggplot2 Git GitHub Machine Learning ML models PhD Pipelines Python R Research SQL Statistics Tableau TensorFlow Testing

Perks/benefits: Career development Flex hours Flex vacation Medical leave Parental leave

Region: Europe
Country: United Kingdom
Job stats:  13  2  0
Category: Data Science Jobs

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