Senior Consultant (Data Strategist)

Job Description

Contract type/Duration: Permanent

Working hours Full time (9day Fortnight companywide)

Band: 3.3

Salary: £63,340 to £73,221 (depending on office location and proven ability)

Reports to: Head of Data & Digital Products

Location: Milton Keynes/London (minimum of two days a week in the office. You can do more than two days if preferable)


Closing date: 12:00 (midday) 14th April 2026

Key Responsibilities

We’re looking for a highly motivated and collaborative Senior Data Strategist with a good general technical background and ready to use their skills to help increase resilience to climate change. You’ll be working as part of a cross-functional and cross-organisational team of innovators, researchers, and infrastructure network operators to develop market ready digital technologies to make UK’s infrastructure system resilient against climate change and extreme weather.


Connected Places Catapult is the UK’s innovation accelerator for cities, transport, and places. We provide impartial ‘innovation as a service’ for public bodies, businesses, and infrastructure providers to catalyse step-change improvements in the way people live, work and travel. We connect businesses and public sector leaders to cutting-edge research to spark innovation and grow new markets. We run technology demonstrators and SME accelerators to scale new solutions that drive growth, spread prosperity, and eliminate carbon.





Climate Resilience Decision Optimiser (CReDO)


Connected Places is leading a programme to develop a digital twin and data sharing platform to increase systems-level resilience of critical national infrastructure against climate change and extreme weather, such as storms, flooding, extreme heat, and drought.


The interconnected nature of the UK’s infrastructure means that weather can have cascading impacts across utility and infrastructure sectors. For example, a flood could cause a failure to an electricity substation, and these power cuts could then cause a domino effect across other sectors and systems, leaving hospitals without clean water or homes without means for communication.


The project started out as the Climate Resilience Demonstrator (Climate Resilience Demonstrator - Digital Twin Hub) to showcase the value of data sharing across infrastructure network operators to understand infrastructure interdependencies between electricity, water, and telecoms and to resolve the cascading risk of failure.


The programme is now scaling up with support from energy and water regulator innovation funding and in collaboration with our industry partners. Over the next two years the programme will develop a suite of digital products, tools, and services to support network operators to better understand and invest in long term climate resilience of their connected networks. The product will support network operator users and decision makers to better understand the cascading risk from climate hazards and plan for increased combined network resilience.



The Purpose of the role


We’re looking for a creative individual with strong foundational knowledge of data science and analytics to lead on risk modelling and data gathering. The risk modelling part of the programme is aiming to develop mathematical models that can describe the behaviour of different types of sites and equipment when they are facing extreme weather events. For example, this would include understanding how a transformer or a remote terminal unit might develop faults when experiencing flooding or extreme heat and how that will impact the whole site; this is what we refer to as asset modelling. We are aiming to use the latter output to then resolve the cascade risk of faults within the same network and in other infrastructure networks. CReDO’s objective is to assess extreme weather-related risks, since these are not very frequent historical data is not always available, which is why in CReDO we use a method called expert elicitation (building on the concept of Bayesian networks) to build our asset failure models. This methodology is based on leveraging asset and operational staff’s tacit knowledge and their expert judgements via a standardised interview process, which is why it is essential that candidates have excellent communication skills and are able to build and then nurture relationships with our project team and infrastructure experts.





To be able to build and run these risk models and, then use them to optimise network mitigation, investment strategies and network resilience analytics, CReDO will need to use infrastructure owner data. The Senior Data Strategist, as the lead of risk modelling and the person with the most conceptual knowledge about the purpose of the modelling, will also be responsible for identifying the data that would be needed to build and then run the models or any later insight generation; to do so you will collaborate with the rest of the team. Within this area, you will also be responsible for communicating those needs to our project partners, support them in enabling their own data sharing processes and collaborate with others to ensure a fit for purpose legal context for data sharing is put in place.





As described above, the Senior Data Strategist role is a key leading role in the CReDO programme. You will work together and be strongly supported by a wide variety of technical and non-technical stakeholders and colleagues. As such, being able to tailor your communication style to enable the work of data scientists, engineers, operational experts, strategic decision-makers and others will be key in being a successful candidate and, then, team member.


What you’ll be doing

• Supporting in shaping the overall direction of CReDO and its offering with the programme leadership and the product discovery and user research team. This includes being active and engaged in team and programme discussions, contributing ideas and being proactive in helping to shape a strong team culture of knowledge sharing and supporting others.
• Communicating progress and outcomes through visualisation, written reports, demonstration, and presentation to support the engagement and project management teams, and strategic leads.
• Interpreting and tackling briefs that are complex and will continuously evolve through learnings across the programme to meet user needs and taking ownership for conceptually reviewing the quality and appropriateness of solutions whilst ensuring best practice across the team.
• Working with our academic partners and experts on designing an expert elicitation method that is tailored to CReDO’s unique challenges.
• Preparing for, designing and running both structural and probability elicitation interviews with asset and operational experts to obtain the information we need to build our risk models.
• Working together with the data science and data engineering teams to process the elicitation data in a fit-for-purpose manner that enables them to efficiently complete their development work.
• Conceptually identifying what data is needed to build and run the risk models.
• Working together with infrastructure owners and project partners to communicate data needs and support them in sharing the data we need.
• Reviewing the conceptual and technical adequacy of the data shared by project partners for the purposes of building and running CReDO; you will be expected to collaborate with the technical team to do this, so that all parts of the project are kept up to date and ready to input into the review process.
• Leading, as the CReDo modelling expert, in collaborating with legal teams, strategic stakeholders, CReDO users and the technical team in Connected Places Catapult and our partners to collectively shape a legal framework that enables data and insight sharing for CReDO purposes.
• Managing the day-to-day work related for the delivery of the risk modelling and data gathering areas of the programme.
• Planning working activities into sprint cycles, managing dependencies with other parts of the programme, and proactively flagging risks and issues and identifying compromises to meet deadlines.
• Working collaboratively in cross functional teams following agile software development principles (using Jira) with colleagues and collaborators including product managers, delivery managers, engagement managers, designers and user researchers, data strategists, data scientists, software engineers, economists and business analysts, academics, climate scientists, network operators (including assets managers, planners, and engineers)
• Fostering internal capabilities and potentially line managing or mentoring junior colleagues as the programme evolves or are on other projects in our portfolio.
• Continuously learning and upskilling on the job to meet requirements of the programme.
• Uphold and promote CPC’s values, ensuring an ethos of equity, inclusivity and diversity underpin your work activity, contributing to inclusive innovation across all Catapult activities.
• Commit to equal opportunities and ethical practices in all aspects of work.
• You may be required to undertake any other reasonable duties to support the Catapult in achieving its strategic outcomes and ensure effective business operations.

Skills, Knowledge and Expertise

Requirements


Essential

• Qualification in an engineering, scientific or mathematical subject or equivalent proved experience.
• Significant work experience outside academia, applying data analytics, science and/or creative data driven solution to real-world projects.
• Good foundational and strong conceptual knowledge of data science, analytics and mathematical modelling.
• Understanding of the core concepts and knowledge of probability and statistics, and common data science and computational statistics methods.
• Experience of quickly and actively learning key concepts in new methodologies and approaches.
• Experience with agile ways of working and working in cross-functional teams.
• Proactive and able to take responsibility for the overall delivery of work areas you are leading.
• Experience in dealing with conceptual problems and collaborating in shaping digital solutions that meet user needs and bring monetary and operational value to clients.
• Pragmatic and outcomes focused, with problem-solving aptitude and creative thinking skills.
• Empathetic, with clear and audience-appropriate communication to both technical and non-technical stakeholders and collaborators, with ability to adjust and respond to others with different perspectives in written reporting, presentations and in virtual and in-person meetings.
• Enjoy forming relationships, inspiring teams around a common purpose and significant prior experience in successfully deploying innovative products.

Desirable

• Masters or PhD in an engineering, numerate or scientific discipline.
• Working knowledge of Python data science, analytics and visualisation libraries such as pandas, numpy, sklearn, networkx and geopandas.
• Foundational knowledge of or exposure to Monte Carlo methods, Bayesian networks and statistics, and corresponding python libraries.
• Foundational knowledge of or exposure to optimisation and decision support methods.
• Foundational knowledge of, or exposure to, economic modelling and cost benefit analysis
• Awareness of climate resilience and adaptation, climate change, extreme weather hazards and their impact on infrastructure.
• Background experience in the power industry (e.g. electricity distribution, transmission, generation and gas networks), particularly in emergency response, engineering and/or network operations.
• Background experience in the water and/or waste water or similar processing industry, particularly in emergency response, engineering and/or network operations.

Benefits

• 9 day fortnight for everyone, every other Friday.
• 23.5 holiday entitlement for everyone, with pro-rata calculations for part-time employees, along with a Christmas shutdown period for additional days off.
• Competitive pension, up to 10% company contribution to help you save for your future.
• Two paid days of volunteering leave per year (pro-rata for part-time employees) to support charitable activities.
• Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) providing 24/7 confidential work/life support services to you and your immediate family members.
• Cycle to Work Scheme encouraging a healthy and sustainable commute.
• Cash Health Plan, offering reimbursement for a wide range of essential and everyday healthcare expenses, promoting your well-being.
• Payroll Giving scheme, allowing regular charitable contributions from pre-tax income, maximizing the impact of your donations.
• Discounts and offers from a wide variety of retailers, enhancing your purchasing power and providing savings opportunities.
• Mortgage Advice benefit, delivered in partnership with Charles Cameron & Associates – provides employees with free, expert mortgage advice and end-to-end mortgage support from the application process through to completion.

Employment here is based solely upon individual merit and qualifications directly related to professional competence. We strictly prohibit unlawful discrimination or harassment on the basis of race, colour, religion, national origin, ancestry, pregnancy status, sex, gender identity or expression, age, marital status, mental or physical disability, medical condition, sexual orientation, or any other characteristics protected by law. We also make all reasonable accommodations to meet our obligations under laws protecting the rights of the disabled.