Senior Data Scientist GenAI

JOB BAND: D
CONTRACT TYPE: Permanent Full-time
DEPARTMENT: BBC Group Strategy and Transformation
LOCATION: Salford
PROPOSED SALARY RANGE: 60000 - 70000 depending on relevant skills knowledge and experience. The expected salary range for this role reflects internal benchmarking and external market insights.

The Senior Data Scientist will help the BBC make practical use of AI tools and systems to solve business problems and help our internal teams work effectively and efficiently.

The role is in the BBCs Generative AI Programme and will collaborate closely with project managers data scientists analysts domain experts and the BBCs technical teams. The Senior Data Scientist will help evaluate emerging AI tools assess whether domain data is fit for purpose design and pilot solutions to clearly defined problems and build the testing methods that show what works and where the limits are; working in ways that are responsible evidence-led and aligned with the BBCs values.

WHY JOIN THE TEAM

The Generative AI Programme part of the Strategy & Transformation team helps the BBC realise value from rapidly evolving AI capabilities in a way that is practical responsible and aligned to the BBCs public service mission. The teams activities include enabling adoption of AI tools across the organisation; fostering innovation; finding opportunities to use AI to work more efficiently as an organisation and leading the BBCs engagement on the wider AI issues that shape our operating environment.

YOUR KEY RESPONSIBILITIES AND IMPACT

• Support the evaluation of new AI tooling including agentic tooling helping to assess performance reliability and practical value in BBC use cases.
• Design and develop approaches pilots and solutions that address clearly defined domain problems using generative AI agentic and automation techniques.
• Build evaluation methods and testing approaches that help BBC teams understand the efficacy limitations and risks of emerging tools and solutions.
• Work closely with domain experts data engineers analysts researchers designers and delivery colleagues to translate requirements into practical well-evidenced data solutions.
• Contribute to the development of high-quality secure and resilient data science assets that support delivery of pilots as well as more scalable implementation where appropriate.
• Present findings trade-offs and recommendations clearly to a range of stakeholders helping to inform decisions on tool adoption and solution design.
• Ensure work is delivered in line with the BBCs organisational values security requirements and responsible approach to AI innovation.

Essential criteria

• Experience of developing and applying data science or GenAI approaches to practical business operational or user problems working collaboratively in multidisciplinary teams and with the discipline to produce reliable well-tested code.
• Strong analytical capability including experience of evaluating models tools or experiments and drawing clear evidence-based conclusions.
• Ability to communicate findings limitations and trade-offs clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Good judgement in applying data science methods responsibly with an understanding of quality governance security and ethical considerations.
• Strong engineering practices including writing clean well-tested and maintainable code proficiency in Python CI/CD pipelines and demonstrable use of AI-assisted development tools to improve code quality and delivery pace.

Desirable criteria

• Experience working in broadcast media start-up or research environments.
• A strong academic background or research credentials in data science machine learning or a related discipline.
• Experience building with Generative AI frameworks (e.g. LangChain LangGraph PydanticAI) and managed AI services (e.g. Bedrock Azure).
• Familiarity with agentic orchestration patterns including multi-agent architectures tool/function calling and memory or retrieval augmentation.
• Familiarity with enterprise automation toolsets (e.g. Microsoft Power Platform Copilot Studio) and an understanding of how they complement bespoke AI solutions in large organisations.