Senior Data Scientist (AI)

TL;DR

Senior Data Scientist (AI): Building early-warning, forecasting, prescriptive analytics, and AI agents for social housing data products with an accent on structured/tabular modelling, deployment & monitoring in production, and connecting model outputs to real decisions. Focus on designing experiments, handling lifecycle/state-transition problems, and applying ML with strong engineering discipline for reliable outcomes.

Location: Manchester

Company

hirify.global delivers data-based insight solutions for social housing clients through market-leading products.

What you will do

• Develop early-warning and lifecycle models for rent arrears, tenant risk, and repairs/property risk using structured/tabular data.
• Build forecasting models for rent payment patterns, balances, and repairs/asset needs over time.
• Design contact strategies and prescriptive analytics (next-best-action / resource allocation) to maximize impact across channels.
• Design, build, and deploy AI agents that combine internal data with external reference sources to support faster decisions.
• Deploy and monitor ML models in production, including drift detection and issue prevention.
• Collaborate with product and engineering teams on a shared roadmap using a test-and-learn approach.

Requirements

• Master’s or PhD in Data Science, ML, AI, or a related quantitative discipline, or equivalent commercial experience.
• 5+ years of serious commercial experience on complex problems with transactional/event-level data and multiple live deployments.
• Experience working test-and-learn with a central data team collaborating with product and engineering teams.
• Strong Python and SQL skills.
• Proven ML toolkit for tabular prediction (e.g., gradient boosting such as XGBoost/LightGBM/CatBoost) and ability to choose simpler interpretable models when appropriate.
• Strong feature engineering, experiment design (no leakage), and model validation/generalization across populations/datasets.

Nice to have

• Experience in regulated or asset-heavy sectors (e.g., financial services, insurance, utilities, public sector).
• Familiarity with neural network architectures and NLP/LLM tooling for occasional cover on team NLP/NN work.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure, ideally AWS.

Culture & Benefits

• Hybrid-working Data & Analytics team focused on building a new generation of data products.
• Test-and-learn approach with time-boxed experiments and honest evaluation.
• No line management responsibilities; opportunities for technical ownership and leading data science workstreams.
• Benefits include private healthcare, 4x salary life cover, 25 days annual leave (increasing to 28 after 3 years), and a salary sacrifice pension scheme.

Hiring process

• Apply via the careers page or email the listed contact.
• Interviews to assess technical depth, experimentation approach, and collaboration style.