VP, Head of Data Science

What’s in it for me?

• Competitive salary and compensation structure
• Generous paid time off and holiday schedule
• Frequent firm-wide social events and activities
• Excellent environment for learning and growth
• Further benefits, depending on location

We are looking for a hands‑on technical leader to lead Penta’s Data Science team: someone who still designs, builds and reviews real solutions while owning execution, delivery and team development. You will be accountable for turning data science capability into shipped, dependable value for our clients and advisory teams, in alignment with our product roadmap.

Penta’s technology makes client outcomes sharper, faster, more differentiated and harder to replace. The Data Science team’s success is measured by how much it improves live client work, not by technical elegance in isolation.

Our core data science focus is natural language understanding at scale, processing millions of articles daily across stakeholder sentiment, topic identification over time, competitive peer‑set selection, summarisation, contextualisation and other processing of unstructured content. Most use cases are creative chains of multiple steps drawn from data processing, exploratory analysis, fundamental ML, NLP, SQL, LLMs and integration into our live systems.

• Manage, coach and develop Penta’s Data Science team, setting priorities, planning capacity and creating a high‑trust, high‑output delivery culture.
• Translate the product roadmap and advisory needs into a focused data science plan, partnering with Product, Advisory, Database, Development and Dev Ops teams to keep delivery aligned with client outcomes.
• Raise the delivery bar for execution, quality, pace, maintainability and cost discipline.

• Design, build and review data science solutions across NLP, LLM workflows, machine learning, SQL and large‑scale content processing.
• Own technical design and architecture for data‑science‑enabled applications, ensuring solutions are maintainable, supportable, observable and easy to operate.
• Product ionise delivery with Dev Ops and MLOps, automating deployment in AWS and putting evaluation, monitoring and provider‑routing controls in place so AI outputs remain reliable and cost‑effective.

• Design and implement AI workflows as skills, models and MCP tools in OpenWebUI, with cost control, provider routing and observability built in.
• Partner with other departments to turn AI capabilities into everyday workflows, reusable tools and knowledge layers that improve internal productivity and client delivery.
• Evaluate emerging AI tools, models and agentic patterns, bringing the useful ones into production quickly and responsibly.

Means the Data Science team is shipping reliable, maintainable AI and analytics capabilities into live client and advisory workflows; team members are growing; delivery is predictable; and Penta’s applied AI capability is visibly improving across products and engagements.

Our Technology team supports Penta’s ambitious delivery plans, using technology to automate solutions, optimise outcomes and support continuous integration and deployment. The six‑person Data Science team sits alongside Development, Engineering / Dev Ops & Platform Security, IT and the PMO, and works hand in hand with the Product team. The environment is collaborative, pragmatic and delivery‑focused. We move quickly, share ideas openly, and use regular hackathons and experiments to generate practical business value.

This is the hands‑on leadership role for that team. Reporting to the CTO, you will lead a team working at the frontier of applied AI and data science, combining production LLM workflows, advanced prompting, agentic tooling, NLP, ML and large‑scale content processing. You will set its direction, raise its delivery bar, grow its people through hands‑on coaching, and lead from the front by actively shaping and delivering the work yourself.

We are forward‑thinking and ambitious in practically applying AI across client‑facing work, corporate teams,…