Advanced Specialist, Data Scientist

Senior Data Scientist at Pearson ELS leads the stand-up and scaling of a shared data science capability. You will own end-to-end DS/ML projects, mentor teammates, and ship models into production, balancing quick wins with robust engineering. You’ll explore AI and OCR for document processing and assessment reliability, leveraging Python and AWS to build scalable, production-ready features. This role sits at the intersection of business impact and advanced ML, driving measurable outcomes in learning and skills development.

• Partner with stakeholders to identify high-impact opportunities
• Own full DS/ML lifecycle: framing, discovery, feature engineering, modelling, deployment, monitoring, iteration
• Build and productionize LLM features on AWS (retrieval-based generation, evaluation, safety, cost/latency)
• Contribute to DS/ML standards: experimentation, governance, documentation, reproducibility
• Mentor junior scientists and collaborate with data engineers and external contractors

• Proven track record delivering DS/AI projects
• Experience deploying models to production and understanding deployment trade-offs
• Practical LLM experience: prompting, fine-tuning or adapters, building RAG systems
• Orchestration experience (e.g., LangChain) for pipelines/agents
• RAG patterns and evaluation workflows on SageMaker
• Ability to select appropriate techniques for measurable impact and maintainability
• Clear communication with non-technical stakeholders; translate outcomes to business metrics
• Strong Python for data science and ML; fluency in SQL
• Degree in a relevant discipline; postgraduate qualification preferred
• Right to work in the UK

• Strong communication with non-technical partners
• Mentorship and collaboration
• Problem framing and strategic thinking
• Python for data science and ML
• SQL
• AWS (SageMaker; Bedrock)