[Hiring] Senior Applied Data Scientist / ML Engineer @WorkWave

Role Description

We are looking for a product-minded applied data scientist or engineer to turn raw operational data into products that measurably improve how our customers make decisions and run their businesses. Which label you carry matters less to us than whether customers end up better off.

This is not a research-only role, nor a service-oriented internal analytics position—and it is not a role for a model builder alone. We want an owner: someone who frames the problem, learns the domain, builds the data when it doesn't exist, ships the model, and stays with it until customers are acting on it and can measure the reward. The road runs through data engineering; deployment and testing are part of delivery, not a handoff. You understand that great models are not just accurate in notebooks—they are usable, explainable, and measurable inside a real product.

Whether you came to this work through statistics, software, analytics, or data engineering, you have a strong bias toward shipping.

What You'll Do

• From Raw Data to Better Decisions
  • Own the Outcome: Take an ambiguous customer problem, decide whether ML is even the right answer, build it, and stay with it until customers are acting on it.
  • Learn the Domain: Get fluent in the semantics of how our customers operate—what a route, a crew, or a service history actually means. A model that is accurate but wrong about the domain creates nothing.
  • Build the Data You Need: When the features don't exist, create them in Snowflake and dbt rather than waiting for someone else to.
• Prove It and Make It Felt
  • Make the Value Legible: Decide how a prediction reaches the customer so they understand it, trust it, and act on it—then report realised impact back to Product and the business in numbers that hold up.
  • Measure Honestly: Define offline and online evaluation for model quality, drift, and reliability, and design the A/B tests or causal analyses that prove a feature improved customer outcomes.
• Deliver
  • Ship and Operate: Deployment, testing, versioning, monitoring, and drift detection. Delivery is part of the job, not a handoff.
  • Embed with Product: Partner with Product Managers and Software Engineers to put ML inside real product workflows—and say clearly when ML isn't the answer.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in applied data science, ML engineering, or data engineering that included owning models in production—including at least one model you built and shipped into a real product. B2B SaaS experience is a strong plus.
• Strong Python and applied ML libraries for tabular problems (scikit-learn, XGBoost or LightGBM, statsmodels or Prophet). Solid SQL expertise is required.
• Depth in supervised learning, forecasting, ranking, recommendation, or optimisation. You have modelled messy operational data, not benchmark datasets.
• You build the data you need and ship what you build—dbt and Snowflake modelling, feature pipelines, deployment, monitoring, and drift detection. We're on AWS.
• You've quantified the business impact of a model you shipped—adoption, outcome, ROI—and presented it to people who were never going to read your notebook.
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to explain complex technical trade-offs clearly to product, engineering, and non-technical business stakeholders.

Bonus Points For

• You've used coding agents on real modelling or engineering work, you can tell correct output from merely plausible output, and you invest in the scaffolding that makes the next model faster to ship.
• Experience with decision intelligence, forecasting, customer behaviour modelling, workforce/route optimisation, or operational intelligence products.
• Prior experience as a senior or lead scientist or engineer responsible for guiding technical direction.
• LLM or agentic workflows shipped into a product.

Location & Right to Work

• Remote (UK-based) with flexible working options.
• Applicants must currently have the legal right to work in the UK. We are unable to offer visa sponsorship now or in the future for this position.

Benefits

• Competitive company pension scheme with employer match.
• Generous holiday allowance / flexible time off plus UK bank holidays.
• Enhanced maternity, paternity, and parental leave policies.
• Ongoing learning resources.
• Comprehensive Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) providing free 24/7 mental health, legal, and financial guidance.

Equal Opportunity

WorkWave is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees in accordance with the Equality Act 2010.

Don't meet every single requirement? Studies show that women and underrepresented groups are less likely to apply for jobs unless they meet every qualification. If you feel you could make a great impact in this role, we encourage you to apply anyway!

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses and identifying potential inconsistencies or verification signals in application materials based on available information. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.