Lead Data Scientist - Public Sector (security cleared)

JOBPROFILE DESCRIPTION

Kainos is recognised as one of the UK’s leading AI and data businesses, with a decade-longtrack recordof delivering impactful, production-grade AI solutions for clients across government, healthcare,defence,and commercial sectors. Kainos is at the forefront of AI innovation,trusted by Microsoft,AWS,andothersto deliver advanced AIand datasolutions atcitizenscale.

Our 150-strong AI and DataPracticebringstogether deepexpertisein machine learning, generative AI, agenticAIand data. We are pioneers in responsible AI, having authored the UK government’s AI Cyber Security Code of Practice implementation guideand we partner with leading organisations to ensure AI is deployed ethically, securely and with measurable business value. Our teams are at thecutting edgeof AI research, and delivery, it is truly an exciting team to join Kainos as we further grow our AI capability.

MAIN PURPOSE OF THE ROLE&RESPONSIBILITIES IN THE BUSINESS:

As a LeadData Scientistat Kainos, you will architect,design,and deliver advanced AI solutionsleveragingstate-of-the-artmachine learning,generativeand agenticAI technologies. You will drive the adoption of modern AI frameworks,AIOps best practicesand scalable cloud-native architectures. Your role will involve hands-on technical leadership, collaborating with customers to translate business challenges into trustworthy AI solutions and ensuring responsible AI practices throughout.As a technical mentor, you will foster a culture of innovation, continuouslearning,and engineering excellence.

It isa fast-pacedenvironment,so it is important for you to make sound, reasoned decisions.You willdo this whilst learning aboutnew technologiesand approaches, with talented colleagues that will help you to develop and grow.You will manage,coach,and develop a small number of staff, with a focus on managing employee performance andassistingin their career development.You willalso provide direction and leadership for your team as you solve challenging problems together.

MINIMUM(ESSENTIAL)REQUIREMENTS:

• A minimum of a 2.1 degree in Computer Science, AI, Data Science, Statistics or in a similar quantitative field.

• Have a deep understandingand developingof AI/ML models, including time series, supervised/unsupervised learning, reinforcement learning and LLMs.

• Experience with the latest AI engineering approaches such asprompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG),and agentic AI.

• Strong Python skills with a grounding in software engineering best practices(CI/CD, testing, code reviews etc).

• Expertisein data engineering for AI: handling large-scale, unstructured, and multimodal data.

• Understanding of responsible AI principles, modelinterpretability,and ethical considerations.

• Strong interpersonal skills with the ability to lead client projects andestablishrequirements in non-technical language.

• We are passionate about developing people, you will bring experience in managing,coaching,and developing junior members of a team and wider community.

• Must have active UK Government Security Clearance

DESIRABLE:

• Demonstrable experience with modern deep learning frameworks (e.g.PyTorch, TensorFlow), fine-tuning or distillation of LLMs (e.g., GPT, Llama, Claude, Gemini), machine learning libraries (e.g. scikit-learn,XGBoost).

• Experience with data storage for AI, vector databases, semanticsearch,and knowledge graphs.

• Contributions to open-source AI projects or research publications.

• Familiarity with AI security, privacy, and compliance standardse.g. ISO42001.