Senior Data Scientist

Senior Data Scientist (ML Platform & Production)

• Senior individual contributor role at a scaling AI-first software business
• Own the full data-to-production lifecycle across ML models, agents and platform infrastructure
• Belfast based, hybrid working
• Salary £95,000 to £110,000
• UK work authorisation required

About the Company

Our client is a fast-scaling, AI-first software business building cutting-edge agent and LLM-based systems at scale. With a cross-functional engineering team and a genuine commitment to technical excellence, this is an environment where senior data professionals can take real ownership of complex, meaningful problems. The Belfast team sits at the heart of the company's AI engineering capability, working on challenges that are shaping the future of intelligent software.

The Role

A newly created senior role bridging the gap between machine learning research and high-scale production systems. You will own the full data-to-production lifecycle, turning complex experimental models and agentic workflows into robust, reproducible pipelines. Alongside delivery, you will establish observability standards, lead deployment practices, contribute to platform roadmap development and mentor engineers across the team. This role suits someone equally comfortable in the weeds of a training pipeline and setting technical direction for a growing platform.

Key Responsibilities

• Build and maintain reliable, reproducible pipelines for training data, feature generation and embeddings
• Partner with data scientists to make training pipelines robust and easy to iterate on
• Own reliability, monitoring and incident response for ML models and agents in production, including CI/CD, versioning, canary deployment and rollback
• Build observability into ML services covering latency, error rates, drift detection and quality regressions
• Contribute to the one to two year roadmap for the data and ML platform
• Set engineering standards, conduct design reviews and mentor engineers on production-grade practices
• Work closely with infrastructure and release teams, absorbing ML serving and pipeline work across the team

What You'll Need

Essential:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
• 5 or more years across data engineering and ML production engineering, including 2 or more years in MLOps or ML production systems
• Hands-on production experience with Google Cloud Platform, specifically Vertex AI and BigQuery
• Strong experience building data and feature pipelines for ML training
• Experience with ML pipeline tooling such as MLflow, Kubeflow or Vertex AI, and CI/CD for model lifecycle management
• Experience with Docker, Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure
• Proven track record owning production incidents including detection, mitigation and rollback
• Strong Python, Go or Java fundamentals
• Experience mentoring engineers and influencing technical direction

Desirable:

• Experience operating LLM or agent-based systems in production including LLMOps
• Direct experience partnering with data scientists on feature engineering or model training
• Master's degree in a relevant field

Why Apply?

• Salary of £95,000 to £110,000
• Newly created senior role with full ownership of ML platform strategy and production reliability
• Work at the cutting edge of MLOps, LLM deployment and agentic AI in production
• Close-knit engineering team with a strong culture of technical excellence and mentorship
• Belfast based at a business genuinely pushing the boundaries of intelligent software

Interested?

For a confidential conversation about this opportunity, connect with Justin Donaldson on LinkedIn or submit your CV via the link below.

Skills:
LLM MLOps GCP Python CI/CD

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