Senior Data Scientist

JOB BAND: D
CONTRACT TYPE: Fixed-term Contract (12 months)
DEPARTMENT: BBC CCOG Audiences Data
LOCATION: London Broadcasting House or Salford Dock House – Hybrid (2 days a week in the office on average).
PROPOSED SALARY RANGE: £59,733 - £69,733 depending on relevant skills, knowledge and experience. The expected salary range for this role reflects internal benchmarking and external market insights.

We're happy to discuss flexible working. If you'd like to, please indicate your preference in the application – though there's no obligation to do so now. Flexible working will be part of the discussion at offer stage.

PURPOSE OF THE ROLE

Fancy working on one of the largest media datasets in the world, using a wide range of data sources and techniques?
The BBC is a major stakeholder for industry leading audience measurement systems. Additionally, our world-class online products (iPlayer, News, Sport, Sounds, and more) reach millions of audience members every week, and create upwards of 1 billion rows of data per day.
As a data scientist, you’ll create innovative models based on these datasets and help to answer questions about audience behaviour and shape the future of the BBC.

WHY JOIN THE TEAM

Working in a team of around 15 Data Scientists, you will be involved in a wide variety of data and machine learning projects. You will be part of a wider team of highly skilled data professionals and engineers and interact regularly with researchers to contribute to high impact projects.
You’ll have the opportunity to get involved with the wider data science community and further develop your skills, through dedicated learning & development time.

YOUR KEY RESPONSIBILITIES AND IMPACT

Select the appropriate statistical and algorithmic approach to solve a given problem, including ad-hoc simple models, proof of concepts as well as long term complex productionised models

Combine data from a variety of sources, from digital activity to panel data, using SQL to interact with our Cloud databases

Use our in-house data and machine learning platform, programming in R or Python

Interact with stakeholders from a wide range of BBC departments, present data and modelling insights, and incorporate their feedback

Keep up to date with latest development in machine learning and generative AI, promoting innovation, best practices and standards across data science work within the team

YOUR SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE

ESSENTIAL CRITERIA:

A degree in mathematics, statistics, computer science, econometrics, data science or related field, or equivalent work experience

A hands-on approach to problem solving, from understanding the impact down to mathematical details

Experience interacting with stakeholders and translating business problems into practical technical solutions, choosing the appropriate model or algorithm

Good programming skills with R or Python

Good working knowledge of SQL and experience querying large datasets

DESIRED BUT NOT REQUIRED:

Experience in a commercial data role, ideally within an agency, consultancy or similarly varied role

Experience working with audiences activity or related online/panel data, in a research, marketing, strategy or product environment

Experience building machine learning models to scale and deploying them into production

Experience working with large language models

If you can bring some of these skills and experience, along with transferable strengths, we’d love to hear from you and encourage you to apply.

Disclaimer

This 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.

Please note: If you were to be offered this role, the BBC will conduct Employment screening checks which include Reference checks; Eligibility to work checks; and if applicable to the role, Safeguarding and Adverse media/Social media checks. Any offer made is conditional on these checks being satisfactory.

For any general queries, please contact: [email protected]

Redeployment

The BBC is committed to redeploying employees seeking suitable alternative employment within the BBC 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.