Senior Data Scientist (Natural Language Processing)

Senior Data Scientist (Natural Language Processing)

Total Remuneration: £57,879 to £68,146
Pay Supplement:The base salary for this role is £46,677 - £54,957 This job qualifies for Digital, Data and Technology Annual Pay supplement of 24% which is included in the total remuneration above.
Pension: 28.97% of base salary (RoS contribution)
Annual Leave: 38 days annual holiday, increasing to 42 days with length of service.
Duration: Permanent
Working Pattern: 35 hours per week. We are a flexible employer and will consider a variety of working patterns.
Location: Hybrid working model. Contractual base either at Meadowbank House, Edinburgh (EH8 7AU), or St Vincent Plaza, Glasgow (G2 5LD). You will be expected to occasionally visit either of these office locations and attend events in other locations as per the requirements of the role.
Number of vacancies: 1
Grade: Senior Executive Officer
Closing date: Thursday 10 July at 11:59pm

Registers of Scotland (RoS)
Join an award-winning organisation recognised for its technology and innovation. Registers of Scotland is a world-leading pioneer in land and property registration. Our full-stack teams design, architect, and build all our registration products in-house. We work to create digital solutions for the people of Scotland. You will get an opportunity to nurture your creativity and develop with us through access to the latest data, software engineering and product delivery techniques.

This job is for you if you want

• Work with purpose: working for the people of Scotland to set the bar for land and property registration worldwide.

• Flexible and hybrid working: depending on the role and team requirements, work when and where it's best for you and your stakeholders.

• Benefits: enjoy pay progression, pension contributions of up to 28.97%, up to a year's parental leave, and 38 days annual holiday, increasing to 42 days with length of service.

• Investment in professional development: we invest in all our people so that they have the right skills to be productive and confident in their job.

• Diversity and Inclusion: We are an 'Investor in People' and a 'Disability Confident' employer. We are inclusive, stronger together, and committed to putting our people first.

• Positive work culture: RoS is an agile, digital organisation using leading-edge technology.Colleagues understand their role in achieving our strategy and have the autonomy to deliver.

To learn more about RoS and what we offer visit our careers pages or watch this short video.

Hear from our colleagues about their experience of working within our Digital, Data and Technology teams on our website.

The Role

This is an exciting new role aimed at growing our data science capability, and the adoption of data-driven methods (including ML/AI) more widely within the business. You will work with a range of colleagues and teams to help solve complex business problems, unlock business insight and value from semi-structured and structured data, support data-driven decision-making and develop new data products for internal and external (commercial) customers. The role does not have initial line management responsibilities, but this may change as the Data Science team and ML Ops support grows. This role sits within our Digital, Data, and Technology directorate, aligned to the Data and Analytics department, and reports directly to the Head of Data Science.

On a typical day you will

• Work closely with a range of colleagues, including product managers, data engineers, subject matter experts, and analysts to identify, formulate and solve business problems.
• Develop credible rule- or model-based methodologies to discover knowledge, create data products, data-driven tools and reports and to improve data quality.
• Explore, analyse and transform complex land and property data in a range of formats and structures and in particular, process semi- or unstructured legal text to extract meaningful information.
• Document methodologies to deliver reproducible and explainable work.
• Use suitable evaluation strategies and metrics to evaluate outputs.
• Gather feedback and monitor the continued performance and accuracy of outputs, including of trained models, as applicable.
• Build understanding of Registers of Scotland data, business processes, strategic objectives and the policy environment in which we operate.
• Draw on government and industry technical/analytical standards and frameworks and adhere to the UK Government data ethics framework.
• Communicate insights and results to technical and non-technical audiences using presentations, data visualisation and data storytelling.
• Build awareness of technical, regulatory and social developments in industry.
• Support development of the team by participating in strategy development, communities of practice and team capability building.

Key Responsibilities

Essential Criteria - Skills and Attributes for Success

Technical:
We will assess you against the following bolded Experience and Technical skills during the application and all during the assessment process:

• Proficient at SQL querying, including full text search.
• Proficient in coding for data science using Python.
• Demonstrates good coding practice like version control, testing and containerisation. Comfortable working in a Linux environment.
• Some familiarity with LLM/GenAI prompting and augmentation for textual analysis, with an interest in learning more.
• Experience working with commonly used data science libraries and frameworks, e.g. Spacy, pandas, numpy, scikit-learn, Keras/TensorFlow, PyTorch, LangChain, Huggingface transformers etc.
• Familiar with both on-premises and cloud-based platforms (e.g. AWS).
• Working understanding of ML Ops workflows and ability to perform basic model deployment without ML Ops support.

Experience Criteria

• Bachelor's/master's degree in a quantitative field or the Digital Humanities (e.g. Computational Linguistics, Data Science, Computer Science or a related field), or equivalent experience.
• Broad knowledge of data science tools and approaches, with in-depth knowledge of language processing techniques.
• Strong analytical skills and experience with ability to critically select, combine and apply a range of scientific methods.
• Expert understanding and application of Natural Language Processing techniques.
• Experience of text mining, data annotation and model development.
• Awareness of Data and AI Governance considerations - ethics, transparency and explainability, licensing and regulation.
• Commercial awareness and awareness of product delivery life cycle (within an Agile delivery context).

Competencies
At application stage, you will be scored against the bolded Competencies and against the remaining all Competencies for the assessment:

• Leading and Communicating/Collaborating and Partnership/Building Capability for All (Engaging People cluster)
• Thinking Wider/Changing and Improving/Analysis and Making Effective Decisions (Setting Direction cluster)
• Delivering Value for Money/Delivering a Quality Service/Demonstrating Commitment and Drive)

Stage one - Application Process

To apply, click on 'Apply now' and complete the online application form.

You will need to submit:

• A CV outlining your career history and how you meet the technical/experience criteria (max 4 pages).
• Responses explaining how you meet the required technical/experience competency aspects of the role (maximum 250 words per answer in the spaces provided).
• Answer 3 binary style technical questions
• After the deadline for applications, all applicants will be sent a short on-line test via the platform Hackerrank, which will assess you technical proficiency. You will have 72 hours in which to complete this.

Please note:

• If we receive a high volume of applications, we may complete an initial sift on Technical and Experience Criteria and technical proficiency test.
• We reserve the right to invite candidates to participate in a telephone interview prior to being further assessed.
• Applications that are not accompanied by CVs or responses exceeding 250 words per competency will not be considered.
• Applicants who do not complete the online assessment will not be considered.
• We would strongly recommend that your statement is written in the STAR format (Situation, Task, Action & Result) and preparing your answers using software such as MS Word or Google Docs, and then uploading the file.
• We strongly advise you review our policy on responsible use of AI in the application process. RoS may check answers with an AI detection tool and will contact you for a pre-screening call to verify your responses.
• Applications and appointments are subject to a strict merit-based assessment process, in line with the Civil Service Recruitment Principles.

Stage two - assessment
If successful at application stage, you will be invited to an in-person interview which will include the following:

• Competency based interview
• Further technical whiteboarding exercise

Information on our Competency Framework . click apply for full job details