Associate Data Scientist - Hybrid Working - London/Home

Why join us

In Customer Data Science (part of the Data Science Hub), we build the systems behind personalised customer decisioning – from customer segmentations to offer optimisation. We impact millions of customers, bringing them value and earning their loyalty.

This team already personalises all of the offers you see in the Nectar app, but now we’re growing in ambition and scale. We aim to personalise everything that matters – offers, online recommendations, digital experiences, communications. And we aim to achieve this using our incredible data asset, our rich customer understanding, and state of the art machine learning and AI.

This role will work in a team dedicated to personalising our customer experiences, developing new capability while optimising the technology we already have. You’ll apply your experience and ideas to design, build, and improve our capabilities – driving value for the customer and the business.

What you’ll do

Solve the hard problems

• Work on the technical development of algorithms and pipelines that will deliver against our strategic objectives.
• Iterate our modelling and optimisation capabilities, applying the most appropriate techniques to use for each commercial problem.

Embody and improve best practice

• Align to best practice across modelling, experimentation, deployment, and model lifecycle management.

Be an enthusiastic member of our community

• Bring new ideas for future approaches, including state of the art techniques where appropriate.
• Understand how our business really works, including by supporting our stores during peak trading periods.
• Actively contribute to our vibrant Data and Analytics community of over 800 colleagues, providing a view on new techniques and approaches that can drive positive change in wider teams.

Who you are

We’re looking for a highly motivated self-starter who owns their own development – you’ll know what you don’t know, and you’ll use the experienced team around you to advance quickly. You need to thrive in a challenging role, and want to balance technical rigour against our need to deliver commercial and customer value.

Value delivery

• Experience in a Data Science role (or equivalent academic experience).
• A strong ability to communicate ideas to audiences of varying technical background and seniority.

Data Science expertise

• Strong grounding in statistical modelling and machine learning.
• Strong understanding of the “how” behind the algorithm; ability to select the right technique for a given objective and avoid pitfalls.
• Curiosity, scepticism and attention to detail regarding data quality, samples, bias and ethics.

Production-grade design

• Extensive programming ability across Python and strong ability to use SQL, with a proven experience of building working ML.
• Understanding of working with production codebases, such as version control.

Development

• A strong awareness and understanding of technology trends and direction in Data Science, analytics and AI.

Essential Criteria

• Experience in Data Science roles or equivalent academic experience
• A strong ability to communicate ideas to audiences of varying technical background and seniority
• Strong grounding in statistical modelling and machine learning, including predictive modelling
• Extensive programming ability across Python and strong ability to use SQL

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We are committed to being a truly inclusive retailer so you’ll be welcomed whoever you are and wherever you work. Around here, there’s always the chance to try something new — whether that’s as part of an evolving team or somewhere else across the business - and we take development seriously and promise to support you. We also recognise and celebrate colleagues when they go the extra mile and, where possible, offer flexible working. When you join our team, we’ll also offer you an amazing range of benefits. Here are some of them: Starting off with colleague discount, you'll be able to save 10% on your shopping online and instore at Sainsbury's, Argos, TU and Habitat, and we regularly increase the discount to 15% at points during the year. We've also got you covered for your future with our pensions scheme and life cover. You'll also be able to share in our success as you may be eligible for a performance-related bonus of up to 5% of salary, depending on how we perform. Your wellbeing is important to us too. You'll receive an annual holiday allowance and you can buy up to an additional week's holiday. We also offer other benefits that will help your money go further such as season ticket loans, cycle to work scheme, health cash plans, salary advance (where you can access some of your pay before pay day) as well access to a great range of discounts from hundreds of other retailers. And if you ever need it there is also an employee assistance programme. Moments that matter are as important to us as they are to you which is why we give up to 26 weeks’ pay for maternity or adoption leave and up to 4 weeks’ pay for paternity leave. Please see www.sainsburys.jobs for a range of our benefits (note, length of service and eligibility criteria may apply).