Research & Development Data Scientist

The FA is excited to be recruiting a Research & Development Data Scientist who will play a key role within the Research & Development function of the Insights team. The primary focus of this role is to design and build world-leading statistical and machine learning models that provide a competitive advantage to England teams.

The successful candidate will develop innovative methodologies to model diverse aspects of international football and deliver actionable insights to a wide range of stakeholders. Leveraging their technical expertise, the Research & Development Data Scientist will design, train and validate statistical and machine learning models, working closely with stakeholders to ensure cutting-edge, data-driven insights are effectively communicated and embedded into decision-making.

The Research & Development Data Scientist will play a pivotal role in creating and implementing advanced analytical models to provide actionable insights and empower informed decision-making.

• Play a leading role in designing and implementing world-leading statistical and machine learning models, drawing insight from football datasets including event data, optical and broadcast tracking data, and GPS/performance data.
• Creatively apply advanced techniques across a range of problems, using the freedom to experiment with many different approaches on long-term projects to provide genuinely novel solutions.
• Research emerging methods across statistics, ML/AI, and adjacent fields to evaluate their applicability to football modelling.
• Effectively utilise AI coding agents and tooling to accelerate the speed of development.
• Maintain high standards of statistical rigour, ensuring any findings that are communicated to stakeholders have been appropriately validated.
• Monitor model performance over time, refining where necessary to ensure continued accuracy and relevance.
• Contribute to a culture of peer review within the team, offering and welcoming constructive feedback to improve the quality and rigour of modelling work.

• Work closely with the Senior Data Architect and Development Team to ensure seamless integration of analytics reporting and models.
• Work within our existing cloud infrastructure, writing pipelines where appropriate to allow others in the wider Insights team to access key model outputs.
• Ensure model development and testing is well-documented, with code written to a professional standard.

• Collaborate with key stakeholders to translate complex model outputs into actionable insights through impactful data visualisations.
• Add to our existing web apps to deploy these visualisations and allow stakeholders to explore model outputs.
• Provide technical guidance and support to stakeholders to enhance their understanding and utilisation of these tools.

• Executes additional tasks as required to meet the FA’s changing priorities.
• Comply with all company policies and procedures to ensure the highest standards of health, safety, and well-being can be maintained.
• As part of the FA’s commitment to ensuring a safe environment for everyone in football, every employee will be required to complete a DBS check. The level of the check required will be based on the activity of the specific job role and in line with legislation and government guidance.

• A Master’s degree in a highly quantitative field (mathematics/statistics/computer science, etc.). A PhD is desirable but not essential.
• Strong theoretical grounding in statistics and machine learning, with the ability to engage with the methodology behind advanced data science techniques.
• Ability to critically evaluate contemporary academic literature.
• Practical…