Senior Data Scientist – Neural Net Forecasting – Welwyn Garden City, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

Overview

In this Senior Data Scientist role you will solve difficult business problems by prototyping and refining algorithms using big data architectures. You focus on forecasting and probabilistic modelling, with rigorous evaluation, validation, and scalable deployment. You’ll document and present modelling outcomes clearly to non-experts and promote data science across Tesco while representing the company externally. You’ll drive innovation, own aspects of project development, mentor juniors, and collaborate with stakeholders to deliver measurable business value.

Pay / Benefits

• Annual bonus up to 20% of base salary
• Holiday from 25 days plus personal day plus bank holidays
• Private medical insurance
• Maternity and adoption leave (6 weeks fully paid paternity leave)
• 24/7 virtual GP service
• Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) for wellbeing

Responsibilities

• Design and improve forecasting and statistical modelling solutions for large-scale retail/time-series data
• Blend data from multiple sources to explain historical behavior and produce forward-looking predictions and scenarios
• Build robust training, validation and backtesting pipelines with time-aware evaluation, leakage controls and stability checks
• Apply productionisation practices including monitoring, retraining strategies, and cost/performance considerations
• Collaborate with engineering, product and business partners to ensure models are reliable, scalable and valuable

Key requirements

• Statistics and programming skills with familiarity in time series or forecasting/modelling
• Proven track record of designing and modifying advanced algorithms for large data sets
• Project and stakeholder management experience preferred
• Numerical higher degree in mathematical/scientific/engineering/economics/computer science (preferable)
• Meaningful academic or industrial work in forecasting or probabilistic/statistical modelling
• Experience blending data sources to explain historic behavior and produce forward-looking predictions
• Valued experience in modelling risk/volatility, econometrics, or multi-year decision making
• Strong programming skills (Python preferred) and software engineering practices (version control, unit testing, CI/CD) and big data/cloud technologies (PySpark preferred)
• Experience developing and deploying models in cloud environments

• Analytical mindset
• Clear communication to non-experts
• Curiosity and scientific thinking
• Time series analysis
• Forecasting
• Probabilistic/statistical modelling

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