Senior Data Scientist & SanTalk Product Owner | S4 | Chief Data & AI Office | Milton Keynes

Overview

Senior data scientist and product owner leading UK SanTalk adoption in Santander UK. You will drive customer-facing AI solutions across contact centres and digital channels, shaping a compelling AI product vision and roadmap. You’ll align cross-functional teams with business needs, ensure responsible, scalable AI delivery, and measure value through production monitoring and benefits tracking. This role offers strategic influence across UK and Group stakeholders and a chance to shape conversational AI in a regulated environment.

Pay / Benefits

• salary range £76,000–£114,000
• 30 days holiday plus bank holidays (31 days after 5 years)
• 6,000 car allowance
• private medical insurance
• death-in-service and income protection
• share plans and employee discounts

Responsibilities

• Own the UK SanTalk product vision, strategy, roadmap and backlog for customer-facing AI in contact centres, chat and digital channels.
• Translate UK business priorities and user feedback into prioritized AI use cases and delivery plans with clear acceptance criteria.
• Represent Santander UK in Group forums to influence SanTalk roadmap and feature proposals.
• Lead end-to-end delivery, rollout, operation and continuous improvement of SanTalk solutions.
• Provide technical direction to data scientists, engineers and MLOps ensuring scalable, secure, production-ready solutions.
• Define success measures (customer, model, operations, financial) and optimize outcomes via monitoring and experiments.
• Manage governance, dependencies and risks in a regulated environment with embedded responsible AI and model governance.
• Coordinate alignment across senior stakeholders in Santander UK and Group, with transparent reporting and practical risk mitigation.

Key requirements

• 6-8 years in data science or applied AI with leadership of complex AI solutions (customer-facing preferred)
• Undergraduate degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Statistics, Engineering or related field
• English language proficiency; Spanish or international collaboration experience preferred
• Strong knowledge of ML, NLP, generative AI, experimentation and model evaluation
• Experience owning a digital/AI product lifecycle from strategy to live service optimization
• Experience designing/conducting conversational AI or customer-facing AI solutions; Sierra or similar platform experience preferred
• Understanding of contact-centre and digitally assisted channel operations, UK regulations, and production AI monitoring

• Technical leadership and solution walkthroughs
• Multitasking and concise reporting on progress, risks and decisions
• Vision shaping, business case challenge, cost-benefit quantification
• Machine learning
• Natural language processing
• Generative AI

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