Senior Data Scientist Privacy & Security Controls

Do you want to apply data science to one of the most important challenges in health research: enabling safe use of sensitive data at scale?

In this role,you'lldevelop privacy and security controls that protect participants while helping researchers generate insights fasterand more safely.

Our Future Healthis an ambitious collaboration between the public, charity and private sectors, designed tohelp people live healthier lives for longer through better prevention, earlierdetectionand improved treatment of diseases. We will speed up the discovery of new methods of early disease detection, and the evaluation of new diagnostic tools, to helpidentifyand treat diseases early,when outcomes are usually better. With over 2.5M volunteers across the UK,we'renow the world's biggest health researchprogrammeof its kind, and our volunteer group is also more diverse than other, similar health research programmes.

Technology and data are central to our mission.

Our systems power web sites, clinics across the UK,secureanalyticsand research systems,pipelines thatprocesshighly sensitivehealthand genetic data, and we are continuing to grow ourdata science capability to support this ambition.

To realise our ambition safely, we need to continue developing world-class approaches to data privacy, datasecurityand responsible access to health data. We are looking for a Senior Data Scientist specialising in privacy,security and risk modelling
, to help design,buildand scale data-driven controls that protect participants while enablingcutting-edge research.

This is a hands-on role whereyou'llapply strong data science skills and an engineering mindset to real operational problems: safe outputs review, re-identification risk, privacy risks in trained models, synthetic data, and data-driven security controls. You will work closely with teams across Product, Security, Engineering, Science, Data Protection, and Researcher Operations as well as external experts to develop practical,scalableand evidence-based solutions.

You will be expected to work closely with users of these systems including researchers, Airlock reviewers, access governancereviewersand security specialists, to understand their workflows, painpointsand risk decisions. A key part of the role will be turning complex privacy and security problems into trusted algorithms,evidence and automated support.

• Develop data-driven approaches to disclosure control and safe outputs review, supporting the scaling of our TRE (Trusted Research Environment) Airlock. This may include building algorithms and automated review tools to classify outputs, detect potentially disclosive content,identify patterns of risk, and provide explainable decision support for human reviewers.
• Work directly with Airlock reviewers and operational users to understand where automation can help, where human judgement is essential, and how tools should be designed to support consistent,auditableand proportionate decisions.
• Contribute to our approach to de-identification and re-identification risk assessment, helping us assess how privacy risk changes across datasets, accessmodelsand analytical outputs.
• Help us develop our approaches to safe AI using health data, including how we assess and manage privacy risks associated with trained models.
• Explore and develop approaches to synthetic data generation, assessing how synthetic data can be used safely and usefully, and how to evaluate the privacy,fidelity and utility trade-offs of different approaches.
• Collaborate with our Information Security team on data-driven security control assessment, threatdetectionand monitoring approaches, including identifying signals of risky behaviour, anomalous activity or misuse of data access environments, and cyber risk quantification.
• Build prototypes and production-quality code, working with engineers to turn promising approaches into robust,maintainable and auditable tools.
• Work closely with governance, legal, ethics and operational colleagues to ensure technical controls fulfil their requirements.
• Keep up with emerging methods in statistical disclosure control, privacy-enhancing technologies, AI security, synthetic data, de-identification and privacy-preserving computation.

This role will be fully hybrid with the expectation we get together in our Holborn, London office at least once per month.

We welcome applications from all who may not feel they match the full criteria, so if you have most of the below,we'dlike to hear from you:

• Significant…