Senior Lead Data & AI Scientist

Location: Manchester, UK; hybrid working with at least two days per week or 40% of time at an office site

Salary: £92,701–£109,060 per year

Company

hirify.global is a UK financial services organisation investing in data, technology, artificial intelligence and machine learning to improve customer financial wellbeing.

What you will do

• Lead the design, development and optimisation of AI and machine learning solutions for complex business challenges.
• Own the end-to-end AI lifecycle, including experimentation, model development, deployment, monitoring and continuous improvement.
• Provide technical leadership across large, multi-team programmes and influence engineering and architectural decisions.
• Partner with product, engineering, data and business stakeholders to deliver scalable AI-powered products and services.
• Embed responsible AI, governance and risk management practices throughout development and deployment.
• Coach data scientists and AI engineers and support capability growth across the organisation.

Requirements

• Extensive experience developing, tuning and evaluating production machine learning models and AI solutions.
• Deep knowledge of modern machine learning, model deployment, monitoring and optimisation.
• Strong software engineering capability with Python, SQL, APIs, event-driven architectures and microservices.
• Experience providing technical leadership across complex, multi-team deliveries and influencing strategy.
• Strong critical thinking, problem-solving and stakeholder management skills.
• Ability to work in the hybrid Manchester arrangement, attending an office site at least two days per week or 40% of the time.

Nice to have

• Experience building agentic AI solutions, LLM-powered applications and retrieval-augmented generation architectures.
• Experience with Vertex AI Agent Builder, Agentspace, LangGraph or multi-agent frameworks.
• Knowledge of responsible AI, model governance and risk management in regulated environments.
• Experience in financial services or another highly regulated industry, plus exposure to Azure, AWS or multi-cloud environments.
• Experience building technical communities, mentoring programmes or engineering guilds.

Culture & Benefits

• Collaborative environment focused on learning, innovation and continuous improvement.
• Pension contribution of up to 15%.
• Annual performance-related bonus and share schemes including free shares.
• 30 days of holiday plus bank holidays.
• Wellbeing initiatives, adaptable lifestyle benefits and generous parental leave policies.
• Support and reasonable adjustments throughout the recruitment process and in the workplace.