Senior Data Scientist

Job Description

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

Reporting to - Interim Data and Technology Team Lead

Band - 3.2

Salary - £57,000 to £62,000 (depending on location and proven ability)

Working hours - Full time (9 day fortnight)

Contract type/duration - Permanent

Closing date - 19th January 2025

If you have been selected for consideration for the position, our Recruitment team will contact you to arrange a preliminary phone interview.

We’re looking for a highly motivated and collaborative data scientist that wants 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 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 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, leading to 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 in collaboration with our industry partners. Over the next three 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.

Purpose of the role

We’re looking for an in individual with deep technical knowledge to lead development of our Python modelling codebase. The codebase includes support for: Bayesian risk modelling of assets against climate hazards and their mitigations; network modelling of the cascading risk of asset failures across infrastructure systems; economic modelling of the economic, social, and environmental costs of failure and mitigation; decision intelligence to optimise network mitigation and investment strategies; and network resilience analytics. These services will be deployed to interface with a distributed technology stack (digital twin) developed collaboratively with our partners. 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.

What you’ll be doing

• Drawing on a broad knowledge of data science and software development methods to leading development and design of our Python modelling codebase
• Interpreting user and product requirements, tackling briefs that are complex and will continuously evolve through learnings across the programme to meet user needs, taking ownership for the quality and appropriateness of solutions, and ensuring best practice across the team
• Building quick, creative, and imperfect prototypes, that will be developed into production ready deployments through iteration. Innovation is uncertain.
• Planning development into sprint cycles, managing dependencies with other parts of the technology stack, and proactive flagging risk 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
• 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
• Continuously learning and upskilling on the job to meet requirements of the programme
• Communicating progress and outcomes through visualisation, written reports, demonstration, and presentation
• 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

Requirements

Essential

• Qualifications in a scientific, mathematical or engineering subject or equivalent experience
• Significant work experience outside academia, applying data science to real-world projects
• Day-to-day working knowledge of Python, data science and visualisation libraries including pandas, numpy, and sklearn
• Understanding of the core concepts and applied knowledge of probability and statistics, and common data science and computational statistics methods
• Experience of quickly and actively learning new methods
• Experience with agile software development and working in cross-functional teams
• Experience turning research ideas into production code
• 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 and presentations
• Pragmatic and outcomes focused, with problem-solving aptitude and creative thinking skills
• Enjoy forming relationships, inspiring teams around a common purpose and significant prior experience in successfully deploying innovative products

Desirable

• Masters or PhD in a numerate or scientific discipline
• Knowledge of network science and geospatial methods and corresponding python libraries including networkx and geopandas
• Knowledge of Monte Carlo methods, Bayesian networks and statistics, and corresponding python libraries
• Knowledge of optimisation and decision support methods
• Knowledge of economic modelling and cost benefit analysis
• Awareness of climate resilience and adaptation, climate change, extreme weather hazards and their impact on infrastructure

Benefits

• 9 day fortnight for everyone, we have a full company shutdown 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.