Senior Data Scientist

This is an exciting time to join the Department for Business and Trade (DBT). We are a new government department borne out of a merger between the Department for International Trade and the Department for Business Energy and Industrial Strategy. We are the UK government department for economic growth. We support businesses to invest, grow and export, creating jobs and opportunities across the country.

DBT is a great place to work – people are enabled and supported to perform to their best and the culture is energetic, collaborative, kind and inclusive with excellent flexible working.

CMRR: Office for Product Safety and Standards

The Office for Product Safety and Standards (OPSS) are here for the purpose of making regulation work to deliver real world impact. Regulation is a powerful Government tool to address market failures, influence behaviour and promote positive action. Crafted and delivered well, regulation can be an enabler of growth, innovation and efficiency. Within OPSS the Analysis Team comprises around 30 analysts and provides analytical support for all the Office’s activity. OPSS is a growing organisation, and we are expanding our data science team to meet increasing demand. Now is an exciting time to get involved and join a rapidly growing team to help craft our thinking around using data to develop new insights into product safety. We have a strong commitment to learning and development and are not afraid to try new and innovative approaches.

At the OPSS you will lead on scoping and delivery of data science projects, working closely with teams across OPSS to identify opportunities to apply data science methods to deliver evidence, improve processes, and identify product safety risks. You will lead pilot projects to establish where data science can add most value within the organisation, and then build on successful pilots and take them into production. You will co-lead the data science team with another Grade 7 Data Scientist, providing leadership and line management to junior Data Scientists in the team. You will report to the Grade 6 head of statistics and data science on projects and will work closely with other OPSS analytical teams and the wider departmental data science community to ensure a joined-up approach.

Ambition, fresh ideas in the development and use of data, and training in statistical and data science techniques are all actively encouraged. You will help OPSS become a data-led organisation, investigate new data sources and methods, and champion the use of robust coding practices and quality assurance.

DGSI: Analysis

The Analysis Directorate within DBT exists to make better policy and to ensure that policy delivery has the biggest positive impact on the UK’s economy. We are here to ensure that Ministers and DBT’s leadership can make informed policy and operational decisions, based on the best possible analysis. Data science plays a big and increasing role in this objective and we are looking to significantly expand our Analytical Data Science team.

As a Senior Data Scientist within the DBT Analysis Directorate, you will lead a team that acts as an internal consultancy to deliver data science projects utilising advanced visualisation techniques, natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning to directly support trade, investment, and negotiations. This is a fantastic opportunity to use your data science skills to deliver impactful projects and help shape the data science landscape within a young government department.

As a Senior Data Scientist at DBT/OPSS, you will:

• Lead a small team, line managing one or two Data Scientists, to deliver data science solutions by applying your skills to a rich variety of datasets including business, trade, and investment flows, tariffs, business interactions and shipping details taking projects from all areas of business and trade.
• Harness the benefits of an internal cloud-based platform to develop analysis, statistical and machine learning models, host interactive visualisations, and collaborate on reproducible coding with Git.
• Analyse and gather insight from messy data using supervised and unsupervised machine learning including regression categorisation and clustering.
• Call upon natural language processing techniques to extract and model text from free text data using techniques including topic modelling, word embeddings and transformers.
• Develop both your own and wider coding and data science capability across the department through training and community events.
• Contribute to analytical efficiency in the department by offering better resource management using automation and web-scraping.
• Broaden your knowledge of data engineering and data visualisation with the help of our dedicated G7s.
• Ensure the quality of your team’s work through applying robust quality assurance methods and coding best practice.
• Disseminate outputs across the organisation to ensure impact. You will present analysis to stakeholders including senior leaders, develop dashboards, and support the organisation in understanding the impact of data science and AI.
• At the position at the OPSS, you will be co-leading the OPSS data science team with another data science Grade 7, reporting to a G6 statistician. In the Analysis Directorate, you will be reporting to a G6 Data Science Team leader who will support you with portfolio setting.