Senior Data Scientist - AI, NLP & Generative AI

Robert Walters is partnering with a leading global information and analytics organisation to recruit a Senior Data Scientist into a highly established product and technology team. This is an opportunity to work on advanced AI, NLP and Generative AI solutions supporting knowledge discovery, search and decision-making across complex scientific and healthcare-related datasets.

The Role

As a Senior Data Scientist, you will design, build and deliver advanced machine learning and Generative AI capabilities, with a particular focus on LLMs, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), information retrieval and NLP.

You will work closely with data scientists, engineers and product teams to develop reliable AI systems that can operate against large-scale, content-rich datasets.

Key responsibilities will include:

• Designing, developing and evaluating advanced AI/ML, NLP and Generative AI solutions
• Building LLM-powered applications and RAG pipelines for search, summarisation, question answering and evidence-grounded insight generation
• Developing intelligent retrieval, ranking, recommendation and decision-support systems
• Applying semantic, vector and hybrid search techniques across large-scale datasets
• Integrating metadata, taxonomies, ontologies and structured knowledge into AI workflows
• Developing robust LLM and AI evaluation frameworks, experimentation methodologies and monitoring
• Improving the quality, reliability, trust and performance of production AI systems
• Writing high-quality, production-ready Python
• Partnering with software engineering teams to deploy AI solutions at scale
• Providing technical leadership and mentoring across the wider team

What We Are Looking For

We are interested in experienced Data Scientists or Machine Learning professionals with strong practical experience delivering AI solutions within applied or product-focused environments.

You should bring:

• Strong commercial experience across Data Science, Machine Learning, NLP or Information Retrieval
• Hands-on experience building Generative AI and LLM-based applications
• Strong practical experience with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
• Experience with semantic search, vector search and/or hybrid retrieval
• Strong knowledge of LLM techniques including prompt engineering, grounding strategies and fine-tuning
• Experience developing appropriate evaluation and experimentation frameworks for AI systems
• Strong Python development skills
• Solid machine learning fundamentals
• Experience working with large-scale text, content or knowledge-rich datasets
• Familiarity with modern AI/ML frameworks and orchestration approaches
• Exposure to cloud platforms and modern software engineering practices
• Understanding of responsible AI principles
• Strong communication and stakeholder engagement skills
• Experience mentoring or providing technical guidance to other team members

Why Consider This Opportunity?

This is a particularly strong opportunity for someone looking to work on production Generative AI rather than purely experimental use cases.

You will be joining an established global organisation with significant volumes of proprietary content and data, creating an environment where technologies such as LLMs, RAG, intelligent retrieval and knowledge discovery can be applied at meaningful scale.

The organisation offers a strong focus on work-life balance alongside a comprehensive benefits package, including wellbeing initiatives, shared parental leave, study support and sabbatical opportunities.

Working Pattern

Hybrid working across London / Oxford, alongside flexible working hours designed to allow employees to structure their working day around when they are most productive.

For further information or a confidential discussion, please get in touch.

Robert Walters Operations Limited is an employment business and employment agency and welcomes applications from all candidates