Who are we?
Thames Water is the UK’s largest water and wastewater company. We make a daily difference to our 15 million customers by supplying 2.6 billion litres of water through 32,000 km’s of pipes, to keep taps flowing and toilets flushing. We are an essential service and have operated throughout the Covid19 pandemic.
At Thames Water, every one of our actions, big and small, matters every day. Water is essential to daily life, and that means our business is always open.
What you will be doing
Data Science Innovation delivers ground-breaking algorithms, digital twins and modelling to solve business and industry problems, as well as being the centre of excellence for data science in the organisation.
Leading a team of data scientists, the successful candidate will be joining this data science innovation function and working alongside data engineers, delivery leads and other disciplines on leading edge platforms and tooling. They will be working on stimulating technical challenges with data stored in a secure and documented manner to protect customer data and company reputation.
Our ML ops process is considered ahead of the curve in the water space and will offer growing challenges to all levels. The benefits realisation will provide transformation to a digital-first, data-driven business
A key responsibility of this role is leading data scientists in exploring innovative applications of data science to create business opportunities. You will then take successful algorithms and models and collaborate with our product teams to scale out results into production - and directly into the hands of our front-line staff.
The right candidate will help us build our data science capability across the organisation by supporting our strategic & technical direction, governance, and recruitment pipelines. They will also work with external partners, and colleagues across the industry to open the door to future collaborative innovation.
As a leader, the successful candidate develops and foster a close-knit and skilled team. This includes building individual development roadmaps for each team member, identifying external resource requirements and negotiating resourcing in the most cost-effective way.
Data Science advocacy across departments and teams, bringing awareness of data science opportunities and capabilities to those we work with, to fill the innovation pipeline of the future.
As Lead Data Scientist, your responsibilities will include:
- Leading multiple projects across the business
- Directly and indirectly, growing and managing Data Science teams
- Negotiating with partners and monitoring the technical aspects of Data Science work
- Assisting in the design of system architecture, data engineering, presentation layer
- Owning and communicating the Data Science strategy for the organisation
To be successful you will have the following skills and experience:
- Proven experience in leading and growing our data science teams
- Very strong academics, ideally a Masters on a highly quantitative degree with research projects
- Strong commercial experience as a data scientist working on a wide variety of projects
- Experience in supervision of machine learning and data engineering projects
- Prior creation and implementation of best practices for statistical data modelling, analysis, and machine learning; data exploration; and processes that allow data team to work efficiently
- Evidence of strategic thinking and vision for use of data in a commercial setting
- Expert in Python and in Open Source frameworks and machine learning packages (e.g. Scikit-learn, Pandas, SciPy etc.)
- Awareness of other data science languages (R, Scala)
- A good understanding of Machine Learning & Deep Learning techniques and graph theory
- Strong stakeholder management and engagement skills
- Strong Communication skills tailored to the audience (exec team, senior stakeholders, engineers)
- Experience in working with large amounts of raw data; preparing, cleansing and processing
- Experience with NLP / Text Mining / Sentiment Analysis
- Experience with collaborative software development or Agile delivery methodologies
- Preferably accustomed with local and azure cloud environments and their data instances (Azure Data Factory, Azure Data Lake Storage, VMs, Databricks)
What’s in it for you?
Our competitive salary & package includes a generous bonus scheme, car allowance, an excellent contributory pension, 26 days holiday per year increasing to 30 with the length of service and a wider benefits scheme.
We’re proud of the positive ways of working we have adopted during the pandemic. We want to create a more flexible and dynamic environment so all our colleagues can thrive. For our office-based roles we are moving to a hybrid approach where we will provide options around working from our offices, our operational sites and home dependent on role/team/individual. This will be discussed during the assessment process.
Thames Water is a unique, rewarding and diverse place to work. If you join our team, you’ll enjoy fast-tracked career opportunities, flexible working arrangements and unparalleled benefits. We’re also proud to be an equal opportunity employer, Stonewall Diversity Champion and Disability Confident Leader and we are a Times Top 50 Employer for Women.
You can find out more in our working for us section of our website.