Lead Data Scientist

Salary: £42,000 - 60,000 per year

Requirements:

• Minimum 5 years in data science or AI delivery, including hands-on leadership of technical teams or workstreams.
• Strong foundations in machine learning and statistics, with demonstrable production experience.
• Practical experience with LLMs and generative AI, including prompting, RAG, fine-tuning, and evaluation.
• Exposure to AI agents and orchestration frameworks, with an appetite to deepen this experience.
• Proficiency in Python and the modern data / ML stack, with sound data engineering instincts.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder skills, ideally in client-facing or consulting settings.
• Willingness to work on client sites, potentially for extended periods.
• Willingness to travel for work purposes and stay away from home for extended periods.
• Eligibility to work in the UK without restriction.
• Familiarity with the Azure AI ecosystem, including Azure ML, Azure OpenAI, Databricks, and Fabric, is desirable.
• Experience supporting business development or pre-sales is desirable.
• Domain depth in a regulated or data-rich industry is desirable.
• Contributions to open source, publications, or a visible professional profile are desirable.

Responsibilities:

• Lead end-to-end delivery of data science and AI projects, owning technical quality and outcomes.
• Combine classical ML approaches such as regression, classification, forecasting, and optimisation with modern GenAI, LLM, and agent-based approaches as needed.
• Mentor and develop data scientists, AI engineers, and junior consultants, growing the teams capability.
• Translate business problems into well-scoped analytical and AI solutions and communicate results to non-technical stakeholders.
• Ensure best practice across the AI lifecycle, including experimentation, evaluation, testing, deployment, and monitoring.
• Act as the bridge between architecture and delivery, ensuring implementation stays faithful to design.
• Support pre-sales and client discussions with credible technical input and realistic estimation.
• Champion reproducibility, model governance, and responsible practice in everyday delivery.

Technologies:

• AI
• AI Agents
• Azure
• Databricks
• Fabric
• Fine-tuning
• Support
• LLM
• Machine Learning
• Python
• RAG
• Cloud
• Agentic AI

More:

We are Talan Data x AI, a leading Data Management and Analytics consultancy working closely with leading software vendors and top industry experts across a range of sectors to unlock value and insight from data. Innovation is at the heart of our client offerings, and we help companies improve efficiency with modern processes and technologies such as Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. This is a delivery-focused leadership role with genuine breadth, offering the opportunity to lead substantive end-to-end AI work in a fast-scaling practice, shape how our team works, influence how clients adopt AI, and keep your skills at the frontier. We offer a compensation and benefits package that includes BDP Plus, 25 days holiday plus bank holidays, a holiday buy/sell option, private medical insurance, life cover, cycle to work scheme, a company pension scheme with 5% employer contribution and salary sacrifice option, an employee assistance programme, and bespoke online learning via Udemy for Business. The role is full-time, in consulting, at mid-senior level, within the information technology and services industry.

last updated 36 week of 2026