Principal Data Scientist

We’re looking for a skilled professional to join our Analytics and AI team. You’ll work closely with stakeholders to identify and prioritise AI opportunities, ensuring outputs are explainable, responsible, and embedded effectively within the organisation.

Collaboration is key—you’ll partner with data analysts, engineers, and product owners to create solutions that meet business needs, while contributing to frameworks that uphold ethics, transparency, and performance. Additionally, you’ll support the ICO Data Academy to boost data literacy and stay ahead of emerging trends in AI and analytics to drive innovation and value.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) is the independent regulator of information rights. In a data‑driven world, we provide advice, guidance, and support to organisations enabling compliance with their obligations, as well as protecting individuals and their personal data.

As an employer, we are passionate about making a positive difference to the lives and careers of our people, and we empower you to be curious, impactful, collaborative and respectful.

• The role will form part of our analytics and AI function, providing technical expertise in the disciplines of analytics and AI. The role will help unlock insight from our wealth of internal data and advise and deliver on the best methodologies for the problem at hand.
• The role will primarily involve engaging with internal stakeholders to deliver analytics and AI solutions that provide value and benefit to the organisation while ensuring outputs are high quality, accurate, and consider data privacy and data ethics by design. Outputs might include reports and dashboards, data and statistical analyses, or products that utilise artificial intelligence technologies.
• The role will also work with the Head of AI and Analytics to deliver wider objectives belonging to our Enterprise Data Strategy (EDS). This includes contributing to our new data literacy initiative, the ICO Data Academy, to empower ICO’s people to better use and analyse data.

• To build, develop, and test AI and analytics products that align with ICO’s business strategies and provide value in a timely, accurate and ethical manner, ensuring outputs are explainable, responsible, and embedded effectively within the organisation.
• To identify, define and prioritise new AI opportunities that might offer value to the organisation. You will be able to work closely with business stakeholders to understand their priorities and challenges, bringing this together with your technical understanding of AI / analytics approaches, to determine practical solutions.
• Feed into the mechanisms / frameworks that provide assurances that AI solutions are built responsibly, and considerations such as explainability, ethics, and model performance are thoroughly considered and monitored.
• Work closely with product delivery mechanisms to retain critical stakeholder engagement throughout the development of solutions, and successful embedment at the time of implementation.
• Work closely with the Senior Data Analysts, Senior Data Engineers and Data Product Owners to ensure AI and analytics solutions are designed collaboratively, meet business needs, and are embedded effectively into operational workflows.
• Play an active role in our new data literacy initiative – the ICO Data Academy – helping to support the empowerment of data skills and awareness for our colleagues, and supporting the broader data analytics community that exists within the ICO.
• Remain continuously informed of new developments in the fields of data analytics and AI, so to be able to assess whether emerging techniques and innovation might be applied within the organisation for to drive new impact and value.

• Substantial experience relevant to the role requirements, as described in the role responsibilities and person specification, and accumulated through any combination of academic or vocational qualifications or experience.
• Delivering AI solutions as part of a data science team, utilising open source coding languages, such as Python, and…