Data Scientist

Data Scientist

Hammersmith, London or Reading, Berkshire. We can also accommodate working from other core sites.

Virgin Media are on a mission to become the most recommended brand by our customers.  The combination of 02 and VM have 46 million of them, so this is a big opportunity.  We have at the heart of this strategy is investing in data science and machine learning initiatives.

This role is a hands-on role working across multiple programs of working including personalisation, operations and network data science capabilities.  You’ll be building ML models and writing code in real time services powering the virgin media digital products (website and apps), our marketing capabilities, network efficiency and ensuring our operations are running optimally. 

A normal week might look like writing prediction models, digging into data to look for opportunities, implementing code for production services, pair coding and modelling with more senior scientists and engineers, feeding back into an established data engineering / ML Ops team to determine platform choices for data scientists to be most efficient and effective.  You’ll work with stakeholders to determine how data science can optimize their processes, and then work with the wider team to bring those solutions to fruition.

We’re primarily a Google and Python shop.  It’s fine if your background is in Azure, AWS or another cloud technology provider, but some experience with cloud or open source data science tools is expected.  Reasonable experience in engineering in Python is required, scientists in this team are working on real time services, paired up with software and data engineers.  This isn’t a job where scientists spend all their time in notebooks, some part is actually moving models into production as part of the team. You’ll feed requirements and suggestions into the current state of technologies and help to choose new ones as well, primarily we build in house.

Apply for this job if you are a data scientist or ML engineer working on production ML backed services and looking to challenge yourself in a new and exciting domain.   You’ll join a great team of product managers, software and ML engineers, data analysts and analyst engineers and data scientists!

The must haves:

• 3+ years experience applying knowledge in statistics and machine learning to real world commercial problems
• Experience bringing live services using machine learning and python to production.
• Expert knowledge of Python and relevant libraries (numpy, pandas, matplotlib, Scikit-learn, tensorflow, etc…) knowledge in other programming languages is valuable, but this is primarily a Python shop.
• Experience with things like CI/CD pipelines, Docker or similar, cloud hosting, good software engineering practices – we have an ML Ops team but as a principal you need to be familiar with why these things are good and how to use/do them
• Experience working in an agile software development environment
• Strong maths or computer science background gained through MSc/PhD education in scientific field / computer science
• Ability to translate consumer business problems into data science use cases and requirements

Other stuff we're looking for:

• Good interpersonal skills offering ability to explain complex techniques to non-technical audience
• Focus on implementation and business impact of modelling through commercial acuity
• Proactive and creative while considering approaches to use data to solve problems.
• Advanced data preparation and munging skills with ability to transform data into suitable formats and outputs.
• Ability to visualise and communicate findings in an understandable manner to non-technical users

What's in it for you?

We know that benefits mean so much more than the 'stuff' we can give you, so we offer a wide range of support, rewards and tools - all focused on helping you to prioritise what really matters.

All work and no play just isn't our style! We're already planning our future ways of working, for when life becomes a little more normal again. We're constantly evolving our approach to enable you to find a great work life balance.

If you go on to be successful in your application, some of the many benefits include:

• 25 days' annual leave, plus UK bank holidays
• Access to wellbeing benefits such as the Unmind App, personal medical cover (which you can opt to upgrade to cover loved ones) and critical illness cover
• Season ticket loans
• Your birthday off every year, to treat yourself
• The option to buy and sell up to 5 days leave, to suit your personal needs

Next steps

If you think you've got some amazing skills to offer us, and Virgin Media feels like a place where you can belong, we'd love to learn more about you. Once you've submitted an application the next steps of the process, if successful, are likely to include a two-stage interview process including technical and competency assessments.

When you apply, you'll be asked about any adjustments you might need to support the recruitment process. Let us know, and we'll be sure to discuss it with you.

Thanks for your patience in the meantime and for showing an interest in joining the Virgin Media family.