Senior Data Scientist

Salary: Competitive Plus Benefits

Location: Holborn Store Support Centre and Home, London, EC1N 2HT

Contract type: Permanent

Business area: Marketing

Closing date: 23 March 2025

Requisition ID: 295496

We'd all like amazing work to do, and real work-life balance. That's waiting for you at Sainsbury's. We're one of the biggest supermarkets in the UK with one of the largest websites. So marketing here really happens at scale. We move a lot faster than you'd think too, across Brand Planning, Brand Comms and Creative, Digital Marketing, CRM and Loyalty, Nectar 360, Insights, and Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability. More people shopping with us each week means more interactions. And thanks to data insight, we understand customers in a way that almost nobody else does. We work alongside incredible brand partners and the best agencies around. So if you have a passion to learn, grow and experience new teams, come and explore it all with us.

Division / Dept
Data & Analytics

Location
Holborn and Home

Reporting to
Data Science Manager

This team is focussed on building our personalised customer decisioning engine, known internally as Krang. We are the brain behind an optimised selection of offers, mechanics and discounts used to drive desired customer behaviour. We do some of Sainsbury's most complex modelling, forecasting, tool building, and insights-generation and use agile working methodologies to make sure we're prioritising the right outcomes. Our Data Scientists are critical in supporting Sainsbury's to be successful in our corporate strategy of Connecting to our Customers.

As a Senior Data Scientist, you will be designing and evolving personalised decisioning to drive both customer loyalty and commercial value.

What will you be doing?

• Lead on the technical development of algorithms and pipelines that will deliver against Krang's strategic objectives.
• Iterate our modelling and optimisation capabilities, identifying the most appropriate techniques to enable continuous learning, expansion to novel mechanics, audiences and channels and the transition towards real-time decisioning.
• Ensure the analytical models we develop and deploy align to engineering principals around efficiency, on-demand, and automation.
• Become the recognised expert in Data Science techniques used for Krang Decisioning and be opinionated on future approaches, including state of the art techniques where appropriate.
• Support Junior Data Scientists in defining projects and analytical approaches, as well as reviewing their code.
• Willing to lead a sub-team on tactical projects working with stakeholders to define goals and Junior Data Scientists to deliver impact at pace.
• You will demonstrate store closeness and support our stores during peak trading periods.
• You will actively contribute to our vibrant Data and Analytics community of over 800 colleagues, providing a view on new techniques and approaches that can drive positive change in wider teams.

What are we looking for?

• At least 5 years' experience in a data science role.
• Extensive programming ability across Python and strong ability to use SQL, with a proven experience of developing complex solutions in a corporate environment.
• Excellent skills and statistical foundation in concepts such as linear optimisation, predictive modelling, clustering and time series analysis.
• Experience designing and implementing price optimisation problems is desirable but not essential.
• Knowledge and experience of: model building, statistical analysis, hypothesis generation, experiment design and execution, either gained through an advanced quantitative degree, or equivalent practical experience in an industry setting.
• Experience using cloud platforms such as AWS or Azure and associated ML tools is desirable but not essential.
• Experience using Jupyter notebooks and version control within a team using Git.
• A curious problem solver who is proactive at developing their technical skills.
• Business acumen and commercial awareness.
• Ability to articulate required outcomes and present analytics work succinctly.
• Independence to achieve results and work under your own guidance and initiative.
• Able to lead technical conversations with data engineers.
• Curiosity, scepticism and attention to detail regarding data quality, samples, bias and ethics.
• A strong awareness and understanding of technology trends and direction in Data Science, analytics and AI.
• You will champion our valued behaviours: 'Own it', 'Make it Better' and 'Be human'.
• Ability to support in the development, training and mentoring of others.

What decisions will you make?

• Devise test and learn campaigns for Krang's decisioning on offers.
• Devise new offer types and decisioning pipelines.
• Recommend the approach to delivering the business outcomes of Krang.
• Decide the most appropriate way to approach key analysis questions, and how to resolve statistical issues.
• Develop and present recommendations to senior business stakeholders based on data and analytics.

Support we will provide

• A vibrant team to bounce ideas off and to support you with specialised knowledge (technical, stats/Data Science or business processes).
• Mentoring from Data Science Managers.
• Cloud computing infrastructure (AWS).
• Automation, and orchestration support from our integrated engineering team within Krang.

We are committed to being a truly inclusive retailer so you'll be welcomed whoever you are and wherever you work. Around here, there's always the chance to try something new - whether that's as part of an evolving team or somewhere else across the business - and we take development seriously and promise to support you. We also recognise and celebrate colleagues when they go the extra mile and, where possible, offer flexible working. When you join our team, we'll also offer you an amazing range of benefits. Here are some of them:
Starting off with colleague discount, you'll be able to save 10% on your shopping online and instore at Sainsbury's, Argos, TU and Habitat, and we regularly increase the discount to 15% at points during the year. We've also got you covered for your future with our pensions scheme and life cover. You'll also be able to share in our success as you may be eligible for a performance-related bonus of up to 20% of salary, depending on how we perform.
Your wellbeing is important to us too. You'll receive an annual holiday allowance, and you can buy up to an additional week's holiday, and we provide private healthcare. We also offer other benefits that will help your money go further such as season ticket loans, interest free car loan of up to £10k, cycle to work scheme, health cash plans, salary advance (where you can access some of your pay before pay day) as well access to a great range of discounts from hundreds of other retailers. And if you ever need it there is also an Employee Assistance Programme.
Moments that matter are as important to us as they are to you which is why we give up to 26 weeks' pay for maternity or adoption leave and up to 4 weeks' pay for paternity leave.
Please see for a range of our benefits (note, length of service and eligibility criteria may apply).