Executive Director, Data Science

About the Role:

14  The Team:

The Enterprise Solutions Technology division includes workflow solutions across Lending, Reg & Compliance, Global Markets and Software business. Enterprise Solutions provides industry-leading set of integrated tools, solutions and data services that help our clients make efficient investment decisions, operate with greater efficiency, and provide transparency across their business and to their key stakeholders.

Group Manager, Data Science [Principal Data Scientist]
Level: Executive Director

Reports to:

Head of Data Platforms & Intelligence - Enterprise Solutions / Head of Technology, CTO - Enterprise Solutions.

Role    We are seeking a Principal Data Scientist to lead the design, development, and operation of high-rigour analytical and machine-learning systems across a complex, regulated financial-services estate.

This is a strategy-led and hands-on applied data science and ML engineering role, responsible for defining the AI/ML roadmap for Enterprise Solutions while also building high-rigour analytical and predictive models for anomaly detection, variance analysis, drift detection, market and behavioural signals, forecasting, and prediction. The expectation is production-grade models, comparable in rigour to fraud, risk, or surveillance systems.

You will work closely with engineering, data platform, and product teams to take models from problem definition through to production operation, including feature engineering, back-testing, deployment, monitoring, and ongoing performance management.

You will get involved early in complex or high-risk analytical problems and step in when models degrade or fail in production. A key part of the role is knowing when to apply advanced modelling, when simpler approaches are sufficient, and when modelling is not appropriate.

You may have limited line management responsibility, but impact is driven primarily through hands-on technical contribution, review, and influence.

Core Technical & Domain Expertise
Strong experience delivering applied data science and machine learning in production within banking, capital markets, or similarly regulated, data-intensive environments.
Deep grounding in statistics, machine learning, time-series analysis, and predictive modelling, with experience building models under real operational constraints.
Hands-on ownership of the full model lifecycle: data exploration, feature engineering, model development, back-testing, validation, deployment, monitoring, and ongoing tuning.
Extensive experience working with large, complex, and imperfect datasets, including missing data, outliers, regime changes, noisy labels, and evolving schemas.
Strong understanding of production ML system design, including batch vs real-time inference, model serving patterns, performance trade-offs, and failure modes.
Experience operating models in production over time, including versioning, drift detection, retraining strategies, and incident response when models misbehave.
Practical experience designing explainable models suitable for regulated environments, including feature attribution and model transparency techniques.
Experience combining statistical models, ML, semantic models, and rules-based logic where needed to achieve accuracy, stability, and explainability.
Strong focus on data quality, anomaly detection, and monitoring, including metrics that surface real issues and drive sustained improvement.

Experience & Mindset
17+ years working with analytics, data science, or ML systems in production, with significant experience in financial services or other regulated, high-availability domains.
Comfortable working directly with data, models, and code, and collaborating closely with software engineers and platform teams.
Pragmatic and outcome-driven measures success by models that run reliably in production, adapt to changing conditions, and withstand scrutiny.
Clear communicator who can explain modelling choices, assumptions, and limitations to engineers, product partners, and senior stakeholders.
Acts as a technical mentor to other data scientists through review, pairing, and example, limited people management where appropriate.

What's In It For…