Lead Data Scientist

We are seeking a highly skilled and innovative Lead Data Scientist to join our Recommendations team within Customer Data Science. You will be the technical lead of the team building the next generation of personalised product recommendations, outfit suggestions, and our AI Stylist conversational experiences, to help millions of users find products that they will love. Your work will directly drive higher customer satisfaction, conversion rates, and commercial impact as part of M&S’s digital transformation.

This is a high impact hands‑on IC role, responsible for defining the technical strategy, implementation and delivery of many of our key online personalised experiences.

Due to high interest, this role may close earlier than advertised. We recommend applying as soon as possible.

• IC tech leadership: design, build, test, evaluate, deploy, and monitor machine learning and AI solutions in production, ensuring they are robust, scalable, and aligned to business needs. Includes retrieval, ranking, recommender systems and LLM‑based components powering conversational experiences.
• Developing the team: mentoring and coaching 5 data scientists, creating a high‑performing team culture with strong technical standards.
• Collaboration:
  
  with cross‑functional partners (Product, Engineering, Design, Delivery) and online business stakeholders to identify opportunities and deliver impactful customer experiences.
• Building reusable capabilities: identify opportunities to abstract common logic, modules, and functionality across multiple use cases, and convert them into reusable core components, frameworks, and assets.
• Technical direction and standards: champion best practices in exploratory analysis, experimentation, model development, evaluation, coding standards, testing, documentation, monitoring, and productionisation.

• Proven track record as a tech lead of a team owning ML/AI problems end‑to‑end, including LLM‑based solutions — from framing and modelling through to production deployment, monitoring, and continuous improvement — delivering measurable business impact.
• Define and instil in the team strong software engineering principles to build robust, scalable ML systems, taking responsibility for performance and reliability in production rather than handing off.
• Strong systems and architectural experience – identifying repeatable patterns across use cases and abstracting them into reusable components or shared capabilities that improve scalability and effectiveness of core algorithms.
• Experience working with large‑scale datasets and distributed data processing (e.g., Spark), and modern recommendation or personalisation systems at scale (e.g., large‑scale retrieval and ranking architectures, real‑time inference, vector representations, approximate nearest‑neighbour search).
• Strong communication skills: effectively communicate complex technical concepts, recommendations, and trade‑offs to both technical and non‑technical audiences, including senior stakeholders.

• After completing your probationary period, receive a 20 % colleague discount across all M&S products and many of our third‑party brands for you and a member of your household.
• Competitive holiday entitlement with the potential to buy extra holiday days.
• Discretionary bonus schemes based on personal objectives and business performance.
• A generous Defined Contribution Pension Scheme and Life Assurance.
• A dedicated welcome to our teams with a tailored induction and a range of training programmes to develop your skills.
• Perks and discounts via the M&S Choices portal to maximise financial and personal wellbeing.
• Industry‑leading parental, adoption and neonatal policies, providing support and flexibility.
• Wellbeing support for all colleagues including access to a 24/7 Virtual GP and PAM Assist.
• A charity volunteer day to support a cause you are passionate about through a dedicated day away from work.

We are committed to building diverse and representative teams, where everyone can bring their whole selves to work and be at their best. If you’d benefit from any support or reasonable adjustments during any stage of the recruitment process, please let us know when completing your application.