Data Science Team Leader

Ready for a challenge?

Then Just Eat  might be the place for you. We’re a leading global online delivery platform, and our vision is to empower everyday convenience.

Whether it’s a Friday-night feast, a post-gym poke bowl, or grabbing some groceries, our tech platform connects tens of millions of customers with hundreds of thousands of restaurant, grocery and convenience partners across the globe.

As the Senior Team Lead for Data Science – Courier Pay & Incentives, you will be the strategic leader responsible for maximising the impact of our real-time courier incentive systems on supply quality, earnings fairness, and operational efficiency across our global delivery network.

This is a high-impact, real-time-first leadership role. Courier pay and incentive systems operate under strict latency and fairness constraints — decisions made in milliseconds affect earnings for hundreds of thousands of couriers and directly shape supply availability at the moment demand arrives. Your team sits at the intersection of economics, real-time ML, and logistics operations.

You will own the data science strategy for courier compensation models, dynamic boost and surge mechanisms, engagement incentives, and the behavioural analytics that underpin fair and effective pay design. Experience in real-time systems, experimentation at scale, and economic modelling is essential for providing credible technical leadership to a senior team of Data Scientists.

Location:

Hybrid- 3 days a week from our London, Berlin or Amsterdam office & 2 days working from home

Reporting to:
Head of Data & Analytics

Strategic Leadership & Outcome Ownership

• Team Leadership & People Management:
  Lead, manage, and develop a high-performing team of Data Scientists through mentorship, coaching, and rigorous performance management. Build a culture that prizes speed, rigour, and courier-centric thinking.
• Own the Real-Time Pay & Incentives
  
  Roadmap:
  
  Define and drive the data science strategy for real-time courier pay systems — including dynamic earnings floors, surge and boost mechanisms, per-order pay calibration, and engagement-based incentive programmes. Partner closely with Product Management and Operations to align priorities with supply health and commercial objectives.
• Drive Business Impact:
  Take ownership of key courier supply KPIs — availability, acceptance rates, session duration, and earnings competitiveness. Ensure the team focuses relentlessly on the highest-leverage interventions and that modelling decisions are grounded in empirical evidence and causal reasoning.
• Business Root Cause Analysis (RCA) & Solution Strategy:
  Lead deep diagnostic analyses of supply shortfalls, incentive inefficiency, and courier churn. Identify whether issues are structural (pay levels), temporal (real-time allocation), or behavioural (engagement and activation patterns), and translate findings into concrete modelling strategies.
• Stakeholder Communication:
  Act as the primary interface between the Data Science team and senior stakeholders across Product, Operations, Finance, and Legal. Translate complex economic models and real-time system behaviour into clear, actionable business narratives.

Real-Time Systems & Model Design

• Real-Time Incentive Engine Architecture:
  Define the conceptual design and validation approach for real-time pay and boost models that must make decisions within tight latency budgets. Balance model sophistication against inference speed, reliability, and fairness constraints.
• Dynamic Pricing & Surge Modelling:
  Oversee the development of models that predict local supply-demand imbalances and compute optimal real-time boost levels. This includes zone-level supply forecasting, elasticity estimation, and incentive spend efficiency optimisation.
• Fairness, Consistency & Earnings Transparency:
  Ensure pay models are auditable, consistent, and free from unintended biases. Define monitoring frameworks that catch real-time drift in earnings distributions, acceptance behaviour, and incentive take-up rates before they affect supply or courier trust.
• Technical Guidance & Design Review:
  Serve as the…