Senior Data Scientist

Position: Data Scientist
Department: AI Growth
Reporting to: Data Science Manager
Location: London or Amsterdam
Hybrid role: 3 days a week from our office & 2 days working from home
Full time / Part time role: Full time

Ready for a challenge?

Then Just Eat Takeaway.com 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.

About this role

Join our AI Growth team and help build the intelligence behind Just Eat's marketplace, powering personalised experiences for tens of millions of customers across 14 countries. This is your opportunity to deliver end-to-end machine learning solutions that directly impact customer engagement and order growth.

We're building JET's foundation model platform, developing embedding models for search and recommendations, and creating intelligent targeting systems for personalised offers and notifications. We're looking for someone who can live our behaviours of lead, deliver and care while bringing technical excellence and innovation.

This role sits at the intersection of cutting-edge AI and real-world business impact. You'll work on everything from fine-tuning large language models to designing sophisticated recommender systems, all while collaborating with ML engineers, product teams, and commercial stakeholders.

We need someone who can challenge assumptions, translate ambiguous business problems into elegant technical solutions, and ship production-quality ML systems that make a measurable difference to our customers and partners.

These are some of the key components to the position:

• Lead the development and deployment of ML/AI solutions including embedding models, fine-tuned LLMs, and ranking systems that drive engagement and orders while raising the bar for technical excellence.
• Apply generative AI and LLM techniques to personalisation challenges, generating customer and partner representations that improve search relevance and app experiences.
• Own your results by designing, running and interpreting A/B experiments with statistical rigour, measuring real impact on business metrics and holding yourself accountable.
• Collaborate with ML engineers to productionise models, implementing MLOps best practices and maintaining monitored pipelines that deliver consistent value.
• Break down silos by translating complex business questions into clear modelling approaches and communicating results effectively to product and commercial stakeholders.
• Be determined to take end-to-end ownership of well-scoped workstreams, independently framing problems, choosing approaches, running experiments and presenting findings.
• Move fast by writing production-quality Python code and efficient SQL for data pipelines and analyses that can scale across our marketplace.
• Contribute to JET's foundation model platform and personalised targeting systems, pushing boundaries to create lasting impact across millions of customer interactions.
• Set clear goals by designing experiments that influence commercial decisions while ensuring statistical validity and actionable insights.
• Aim higher by staying current with advances in search, retrieval, recommendations and LLM applications, bringing fresh ideas to drive the AI Growth vision forward.

What will you bring to the team?

• Proven track record delivering end-to-end ML solutions from problem framing through data exploration to production deployment and experiment measurement, demonstrating your commitment to achieving goals.
• Hands-on expertise in search, retrieval and recommendation techniques including embedding-based approaches, learning-to-rank, and vector similarity search with measurable business impact.
• Practical experience applying LLMs in production environments, including prompt engineering, fine-tuning, structured output validation and assessing generative output quality.
• Strong experimentation skills with ability to design and interpret A/B tests, reason about statistical significance, and understand the gap between offline and online performance.
• Production-grade Python coding abilities that go beyond notebooks, writing clean, testable code suitable for engineering workflows and collaboration with technical teams.
• Proficient SQL skills across complex data warehouses, including partitioning, window functions, and large-table joins, with focus on query efficiency and data quality.
• Excellent problem-framing and communication skills to translate ambiguous business questions into modelling approaches and explain technical results to non-technical stakeholders based on respect and mutual support.
• Self-starter attitude comfortable with autonomy and ambiguity, thriving in fast-paced environments where you can build rapidly, test rigorously and roll out successes at scale.
• Strong collaboration skills to work effectively with senior data scientists, ML engineers, product partners and commercial teams across different levels and functions.
• Results-driven mindset with attention to detail, able to balance speed of execution with technical rigour while making data-informed decisions that create lasting impact.

Bonus skills that will help you excel:

• Experience with causal inference or uplift modelling relevant to promotions and growth initiatives.
• Knowledge of sequential or session-based recommendation modelling techniques.
• Familiarity with real-time data pipelines and streaming infrastructure.
• Experience working across multiple languages or markets in a data science context.

At JET, this is how we play

Our teams forge connections internally and work with some of the best-known brands on the planet, giving us truly international impact in a dynamic environment.

Being the best at what we do isn't just about delivering on our strategy. It's a competition for something incredibly valuable – our customers' choice. Every time a customer decides where to order, they're picking a side.

At the heart of the JET Customer League are our values and behaviours. They guide every interaction, every decision, every innovation. These are the actions we need to perform consistently and brilliantly, to surpass the competition and earn our customers' loyalty, again and again.

Fun, fast-paced and supportive, the JET culture is about movement, growth, helping one another to succeed and celebrating wins. By truly living our values and embodying our behaviours, we're building a customer-first culture which enables us to stay one step ahead of the competition.

Inclusion, Diversity & Belonging

No matter who you are, what you look like, who you love, or where you are from, you can find your place at Just Eat Takeaway.com. We're committed to creating an inclusive culture, encouraging diversity of people and thinking, in which all employees feel they truly belong and can bring their most colourful selves to work every day.

What else are we delivering?

Want to know more about our JETers, culture or company? Have a look at our career site where you can find people's stories, blogs, podcasts and more JET journeys.

Are you ready to join the team? Apply now!

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