Senior Data Scientist - Neural Net Forecasting

Location: Welwyn Garden City, United Kingdom; hybrid working with 60% of the week at office locations or local sites and the remainder remotely

Company

Tesco combines supermarket retail, technology services, and a mobile network to improve experiences for customers, colleagues, and communities.

What you will do

• Design and improve forecasting and statistical modelling solutions for large-scale retail and business time series.
• Blend data from multiple sources to explain historic behaviour and generate forward-looking predictions and scenarios.
• Build training, validation, and backtesting pipelines with time-aware evaluation, leakage controls, and stability checks.
• Productionise models with monitoring, retraining strategies, and performance and cost optimisation.
• Collaborate with engineering, product, and business partners to deliver reliable, scalable models and measurable business value.
• Drive innovation, represent data science externally, and mentor junior team members and interns.

Requirements

• Senior-level experience designing and modifying advanced algorithms for large datasets.
• Meaningful academic or industrial experience in forecasting or probabilistic/statistical modelling.
• Strong understanding of mathematics, statistics, time series analysis, and numerical methods.
• Strong programming skills, with Python preferred, plus software engineering practices including version control, unit testing, and CI/CD.
• Experience with big data and cloud technologies; PySpark is preferred.
• Ability to validate, document, present, and clearly explain complex modelling solutions to non-experts.

Nice to have

• Experience in risk or volatility modelling, econometrics, scenario modelling, uncertainty quantification, causal analysis, or long-range planning.
• Project and stakeholder management experience.
• Experience developing and deploying models in cloud environments.

Culture & Benefits

• Hybrid working model with office and remote flexibility.
• Annual bonus scheme of up to 20% of base salary.
• At least 25 days of holiday plus a personal day and bank holidays.
• Private medical insurance and a free 24/7 virtual GP service.
• Paid maternity, adoption, and paternity leave, subject to applicable eligibility conditions.
• Employee Assistance Programme and access to mental wellbeing support.