Data Science Manager

Overview

In this role you will drive insight-driven, customer-centric decisions across Commercial, Retail and Supply Chain domains, collaborating with cross-functional teams to turn data into actionable business outcomes. You will shape, build and deploy data science solutions that improve customer experience, profitability and efficiency, operating within a central data science team spanning John Lewis, Waitrose and John Lewis Money. You’ll own the domain roadmap, balance stakeholder needs, and advocate for AI and ML methods to scale impact. This is a hands-on, collaborative role with opportunities to influence real business outcomes and adopt cutting-edge AI tools.

Pay / Benefits

• hybrid working
• flexible working arrangements
• competitive salary
• employee-owned culture

Responsibilities

• Analyse and link complex datasets to support actionable insights and recommendations
• Identify opportunities to drive business impact with data science
• Transform data and build models to optimise customer experience, profitability, cost reduction and other outcomes
• Convey the benefits and use cases of statistics, machine learning, and AI to diverse audiences
• Design and develop end-to-end solutions from problem definition to implementation and adoption
• Embrace agile practices, establish technical best practices, and apply AI tools to improve productivity
• Collaborate with multidisciplinary teams (Senior Data Scientists, ML Engineers, Analysts, Architects) to drive technical product delivery
• Own and manage a domain-specific data science roadmap and stakeholder relationships

Key requirements

• Proficiency in Python and SQL with hands-on data science capability
• Experience with ML Ops (Vertex AI) and Git version control; followed by software engineering best practices
• Strong problem-solving mindset and willingness to apply new data science techniques
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills in cross-functional teams
• Business acumen to identify KPI-driven problems and prioritise initiatives
• Learning mindset and ability to apply AI tools to day-to-day workflows
• Desirable: Retail or Grocery sector experience
• Desirable: Agile methodologies in multidisciplinary product teams
• Desirable: Experience with Snowflake, DBT, GitLab and Google Cloud Platform
• Desirable: Prior people management experience

• Communication
• Cross-functional collaboration
• Business acumen
• Python
• SQL
• ML Ops (Vertex AI)

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