Head of Data Science & AI

How do you make our customers happy?
From personalized recommendations to demand forecasts, and from fraud signals to ‘automagic’ price adjustments: the decisions shaping the experience of 14 million customers are increasingly inspired, or even made, by models. As Head of Data Science & AI, you make sure those models (and the people who build them) deserve that trust. Your first six months are all about elevating our data craft and strengthening the data science community, including its leadership.

How can we build a data science community that is ahead – and stays ahead – of the curve? How do we attract and retain great minds? It’s up to you to build a world-class data science community where people and AI thrive and work together.

How do you make our customers happy?
From personalized recommendations to demand forecasts, and from fraud signals to ‘automagic’ price adjustments: the decisions shaping the experience of 14 million customers are increasingly inspired, or even made, by models. As Head of Data Science & AI, you make sure those models (and the people who build them) deserve that trust. Your first six months are all about elevating our data craft and strengthening the data science community, including its leadership.

How can we build a data science community that is ahead – and stays ahead – of the curve? How do we attract and retain great minds? It’s up to you to build a world-class data science community where people and AI thrive and work together.

The biggest challenge
Right now, data science is distributed, with pockets of brilliance that don't always add up to a shared standard. You make sure that it does. How do you set a quality bar high enough to matter and practical enough that data scientists want to clear it? You need to bring bol's data scientists, spread across every domain, into one coherent way of working.

You must also set the strategy for where bol invests in Data Science and AI capabilities, helping determine where domain-specific innovation adds value, and where shared AI capabilities (or AI-adjacent data products) create leverage. The second challenge has to do with capital and control. What is the right balance between letting domains move fast and keeping AI coherent, trustworthy, and safe?

You decide where central investment goes. And which models are critical enough, because of risk, scale, or consequence, to own outright and where autonomy is the better call.

What you'll do as the Head of Data Science & AI
You'll define and own bol's data science and AI vision and strategy, reporting to the Director of Data, Analytics & AI. Initially, you primarily zoom in on craft coherence and excellence. You have a dotted-line relationship with data scientists embedded across bol's domains, and a small core team to help you build shared standards, tooling, and training programs for the data science community.

Success is measured by outcomes. Within the data science community, and beyond, because the more impact we create for customers, partners and business stakeholders, the better. In short:

- Define and own the data science and AI strategy, aligned with product, technology, and business priorities — including where we invest, and clear build / buy / reuse choices

- Develop, evangelize and elevate our data science craft: standards, tooling, training, and quality bar for our data scientists, company-wide, most of whom report elsewhere

Grow and lead a central data science and AI team, scaling as scope expands

- Oversee the full model lifecycle: development, validation, deployment, monitoring, and retraining

- Enable domain teams to build and deploy AI with confidence, through shared patterns, standards, and expert support

- Partner closely with Data Platform & Engineering to…