There has never been a more exciting time to join our digital and data team! Why? Because we are at the start of a journey that will fundamentally change our business, and how our customers shop with us both today – and in the future.
As a result, we are looking for an experienced technical leader to help us continue to turbocharge data science at M&S.
The community is dedicated to building end-to-end AI and machine learning solutions in retail and e-commerce. This helps our colleagues in Food, Clothing & Home, Fashion, Marketing, Loyalty, Supply Chain, Growth and Customer Services to drive value from data and build personalised experiences for our customers.
We apply state of the art machine learning techniques to seek a variety of problems such as outfit recommendations in fashion, personalised offers for our loyalty program, pricing optimisation, demand forecasting for supply chain, product waste management for retail, and AI powered campaigns for our marketing.
So, if you’re a technical leader who’d like to be part of a team that is already making a difference, and help us transform into an extraordinary data driven organisation, we’d love to hear from you.
Key accountabilities and measures
- Develop, mentor and coach individual team members.
- Lead the concurrent development of multiple projects through an agile workflow.
- Use experienced knowledge of data science techniques and statistics to both lead and regularly deliver sophisticated projects, with a robust commercial approach, being mindful that operationalisation is a key success criteria.
- Develop a long-term vision of the team, clearly demonstrate an expertise above and beyond current capabilities and introduce data science solutions into everyday business problems.
- Implement a highly visual and commercial approach when delivering data science projects that engages and challenges the thinking of non-technical audiences.
- Build industrialised data science products by promoting accurate software development standards and practices.
- Work with business and technology partners to establish a productive analytical and development environment.
- Work as a hands-on technical leader, take the ownership of delivering sophisticated projects, support their team members and play a role model.
Key skills
- Significant experience in landing data science capability, applying the most effective statistical and ML models on real world commercial problems and having measured the business benefits.
- MSc or PhD in a STEM subject e.g. Computer Science, Statistics, Mathematics, etc.
- Strong statistical background applied across a number of areas: segmentations, NLP, predictive modelling and recommendation systems.
- Experience using both simple and sophisticated statistical models such as regression, clustering, affinity analysis, causal inference models, time series, convolutional neural networks and transformers.
- Comprehensive proficiency in key programming and scripting languages (e.g. Python, R, SPARK, SQL, etc) and software development skills.
- Specialist in mining large & sophisticated data sets – both structured and unstructured data and including (but not limited to) efficient extraction of data, transformation and application.
- Able to demonstrate innovation in approach and application.
- Development of collaborative relationships with colleagues across the business.
- Clear interpersonal skills are important, as the role will require translating data science into meaningful insight and influencing wider community at M&S.
