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Senior Research Data Scientist
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Senior Research Data Scientist
Senior Research Data Scientist – AI Strategy, Research & Enablement
Location: Global (remotely enabled) Team: AI Strategy, Research & Enablement Reference: [UNIQUE REF]
About dunnhumby
dunnhumby is the global leader in Customer Data Science, partnering with the world’s most ambitious retailers and brands to place the customer at the heart of every decision. By combining deep insight, advanced technology and close collaboration, we enable our clients to grow, innovate, and deliver measurable value for their customers.
dunnhumby employs nearly 2,500 experts across Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas, working alongside transformative, iconic brands such as Tesco, Coca-Cola, Nestlé, Unilever, and Metro.
About the Role
You’ll join the AI Strategy, Research & Enablement team, where you’ll help shape the future of AI across dunnhumby. Working at the intersection of cutting-edge research and real-world commercial application, your role will transform innovative AI ideas into scalable, strategic capabilities that influence long-term product development, platform design, and business direction.
You’ll collaborate closely with senior leaders and contribute to decision-making across data science, AI engineering, and product strategy, ensuring dunnhumby stays at the forefront of emerging AI technologies.
This high-impact role is perfect if you are a senior research data scientist passionate about:
- Developing next-generation AI models with direct impact on retail, personalisation, and forecasting.
- Bridging the gap between theoretical research and scalable production systems.
- Influencing dunnhumby’s AI strategy through thought leadership, partnerships, and hands-on experimentation.
What You’ll Be Doing
Core Responsibilities
- Drive the design, experimentation, and evaluation of transformer-based models tailored for retail challenges.
- Explore and implement innovative AI architectures, including:
- Sequence-to-sequence models
- Causal transformers
- Hybrid retrieval + transformer approaches
- Develop research-quality prototypes and collaborate with AI/ML engineers to translate them into scalable, production-ready applications.
- Proactively explore emerging AI trends, such as generative AI, multimodal learning, and representation learning, for retail applications.
- Identify and assess cutting-edge ML techniques with high potential for retail and consumer analytics, shaping proposals for feasibility and pilot testing.
- Build internal thought leadership by defining ML best practices, standards, and guidelines. Advise data science, engineering, and product teams on AI adoption.
- Forge strategic academic and industrial research partnerships to:
- Co-develop novel AI models
- Collaborate on joint experiments
- Explore high-potential AI applications for retail
- Mentor junior data scientists and contribute to building dunnhumby’s deep learning expertise, fostering a shared innovation culture.
- Partner with internal product and platform teams to ensure alignment between research paths and dunnhumby’s technological roadmap.
- Document best practices and frameworks for reuse across the organisation, including libraries and tools.
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Impact at Scale
You’ll be shaping dunnhumby’s AI strategy, product roadmap, and long-term CapEx—positions where your ideas can have measurable impact at scale.
What We Expect From You
Essential
- Expertise in transformer architectures (e.g., BERT, GPT-3, T5, Time-Series Transformers, or de facto getting-to-know architects etc.).
- Helpful hands-on experience with modern deep learning frameworks, particularly PyTorch.
- Solidof ondemand familiarization with machine learning fundamentals, statistical learning, and probabilistic methodologies.
- Deep familiarity with distributed training techniques, GPU optimisation, and optimisation methods.
- A track record of delivering impactful AI/ML models in either a research or production environment.
- Curiosity-driven problem-solving: Ability to turn hypothetical research ideas into structured studies or prototypes.
- Passion for staying agile in the fast-evolving tech landscape, eagerly tracking and evaluating state-of-the-art advances in AI.
- Strong data manipulation and transformation skills (e.g., PySpark, SQL, cloud data pipelines) to handle large-scale datasets.
- Excellent communication skills, capable of explaining complex technical concepts clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Collaborative mindset to work seamlessly with ML engineers, product managers, academic collaborators, or executive leadership.
- A balance between scientific inquiry and business pragmatism, translating cutting-edge theory into practical value.
- Thirst to shape AI capabilities at dunnhumby through hands-on engineering and strategic influence.**
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Nice to Have
- Experience with retail or consumer packaged goods (CPG) data challenges, particularly in modelling recommendations, personalisation, or forecasting.
- Participation in peer-reviewed academic research (papers, workshops, conferences) or active engagement with the AI/ML research community.
- Knowledge of vector databases and/or embedding techniques (e.g., Faiss, Pinecone, Weaviate).
- A portfolio of work featuring efficient large-scale data pipelines (batch, streaming) and associated tooling (PySpark, Dask, cloud-native processing).
What You Can Expect From Us
At dunnhumby, we push beyond expectations, offering comprehensive rewards and flexible, supportive work environments that foster innovation and growth.
Rewards and Perks
- Cutting-edge technological investment, ensuring access to the latest research tools.
- Micropassesphrase to the flexibility and smaller-workforce feel—permission to explore, experiment, and learn within a dynamic team.
- Birthday off + flexible working hours—because alignment between work and life directs peak performance.
- High-class perks, from L&D budget to seasonal festivities.
Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging
Why we succeed as a team, you thrive as you. Our global D&E programmes celebrate togetherness through: 🌈 dh Gender Equality Network 🏳️🌈 dh Proud (lgbt+) 👨👩👧👦 dh Family ⚡ dh One (neurodiversity) 🦽 dh Enabled (producing work wit) 🔥 dh Thrive (speaker’s sponsorship + latent career passage).
We’re committed to making this process work best for you. Please share how you might benefit from accommodation(s) or supports at each stage.
Flexible Work
We value individual balance and support it with flexible working models flexible enough to meet your needs.
We acknowledge that certain roles may not inherently lend themselves to pure remote work. Determine with your recruiter which options are appropriate for this role; we’re open to discussing agile work structures as soon as your interview unfolds.
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