Senior Data Scientist (Natural Language Processing)

Job summary

This role is about progressing the adoption of data-driven methods, machine learning and 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 and models. The post-holder will not have initial line management responsibilities, but this may change as the team grows.

Job description

On a typical day you will…

• Work closely with a range of colleagues, including product managers, data engineers, subject matter experts, and business analysts to identify, formulate and solve business problems.
• Develop credible rule- or model- based methodologies to discover knowledge, train models, help create data products, data-driven tools and reports and to support data quality improvement activities.
• 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 detect, classify and extract information.
• Document methodologies to deliver reproducible and explainable work.
• Use suitable evaluation strategies, metrics and error analysis to evaluate outputs.
• Gather feedback and monitor the continued performance and accuracy of outputs, including ML 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, staff management and team capability building.

Person specification

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

Technical

• Background in a quantitative field e.g. Data Science, Computer Science, Digital Linguistics or a related field.
• Broad awareness of data science tools and approaches.
• In-depth knowledge of language processing tools and techniques e.g. text preprocessing, syntactic analysis and semantic analysis.
• In-depth knowledge of deep learning/transformer architectures (e.g. BERT), domain adaptation and task-specific model training.
• Knowledge or experience of working with very large foundational models, e.g. augmentation for textual analysis or instruction tuning.
• Working understanding of MLOps workflows and ability to perform the basics of model deployment without MLOps support.
• Familiarity/experience of cloud-based platforms (e.g. AWS SageMaker).
• Proficient at SQL querying, including text search.
• Proficient in coding for data science using Python.
• Experience working with commonly used data science libraries and frameworks, e.g. Spacy, scikit-learn, Keras/TensorFlow, PyTorch, LangChain, Huggingface Transformers etc.
• Demonstrates good coding/engineering practice. Comfortable working in a Linux environment.

Experience

• Proven ability to acquire business/domain understanding required for tasks (experience working with legal text data would be an advantage).
• Experience of text mining, data annotation and the development of training data for supervised model training.
• Experience working within an Agile delivery context.
• Strong and critical ability to select, combine and apply rule-based and model development approaches to complex business problems.
• Demonstrable awareness of Data and AI Governance considerations in a highly regulated environment.

Behaviours

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

Seeing the Big Picture/Making Effective Decisions (cluster)

• Understand organisational priorities and align analytical solutions to strategic objectives.
• Use evidence and appropriate analytical approaches to solve complex problems, while considering ethical, regulatory and governance requirements.

Changing and Improving/Managing a Quality Service (cluster)

• Apply new technologies and methods to deliver business improvement.
• Identify opportunities to enhance data quality, models and services.
• Balance stakeholder priorities, feedback and delivery timescales to provide a high-quality service.

Communicating and Influencing

• Communicate complex technical concepts clearly to a range of audiences.
• Present insights and recommendations that support informed decision-making.

Working Together

• Work collaboratively with technical and business colleagues to solve complex problems.
• Share expertise and contribute to team capability and continuous improvement.

Behaviours

We'll assess you against these behaviours during the selection process:

• Seeing the Big Picture
• Changing and Improving
• Communicating and Influencing
• Working Together

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £62,301, Registers of Scotland contributes £18,048 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides (opens in a new window).

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

Our Tech stack

• • Backend: