Data Science Team Lead

About 15gifts

At 15gifts, we’re obsessed with the psychology of choice. We study the key consumer psychology principles that enable consumers to make confident choices on the high street, and we replicate these within our digital guided selling technology to enable consumers to make the same confident decisions online.

We work with some of the world’s leading telecommunications and media brands throughout Europe & the U.S. with our technology powering millions of confident customer decisions across brands such as Verizon, T-Mobile, O2, Sky, Virgin Media, EE, BT, Tesco and Vodafone.
 
With every interaction, we learn more about our clients' customers. Gathering insights to generate increasingly accurate product recommendations, whilst building up a detailed profile on each individual consumer.

We’re a fast growing organisation with continued ambitious growth targets over the coming years and we’re extremely excited about the opportunities that lie ahead. We’re a team that’s made of driven, ambitious, and exceptional individuals and we’re looking for like-minded people to become part of our success story.

About the role

We are looking for an excellent data science team lead with the drive and enthusiasm to manage, mentor and inspire our team of data scientists.

Data science is at the heart of what we do, from our recommendation engine and our greenfields machine learning projects to our Bayesian experimentation and optimisation. This is a great opportunity to play a crucial role in guiding and scaling our data science team as we move into a period of investment and growth.

We work in an AWS, snowflake, dbt, looker, python and fivetran stack and you would ideally be comfortable with these (or similar) and have a strong background and expertise in machine learning, programming and statistics. You should also be able to demonstrate a deep understanding of how these and other techniques can be applied to business problems and generate value.

As our data science team lead you will need to be comfortable managing people and bringing out the best in them, confident advocating for your team when required and enjoy fostering best practices. You will also be responsible for planning and managing an internal data science roadmap as well as executing this plan.

You will also need to be a part time individual contributor - and be confident taking a project brief and drawing out requirements, designing mvp solutions and getting sign off with the various stakeholders. Combining this with leading a team you will need to be adept at managing your time to execute the plan and/or supporting others in the team to do so.

We are looking for someone who is a self-starter, with the ability to see the big picture and understand how our data points are connected. We would like you to use your excellent communication skills to simplify concepts and explain them to others, and be comfortable liaising with people from all levels of the organisation whilst translating their needs and wants into clear requirements.

The successful candidate will join our fast growing and dynamic data team and work alongside our data engineers, analytics engineers, and customer analysts to provide the data products and insights which make a difference across the business.

To succeed in this role you will need to manage and mentor a high performing data science team which designs, creates and maintains intelligent data products and drives measurable business value.

The person we’re looking for 

• Passionate about designing and delivering solutions to complex problems
• Curious with a desire for continuous learning
• Friendly with a collaborative attitude to solving problems
• Top notch communication skills
• Self-motivated and self-managing, with task organisational skills
• Comfortable both expressing your opinions and also listening to the opinions of others as required by the situation
• Experienced and passionate about getting the most from data

You’ll be responsible for

• Growing and managing our data science team
• Building and managing our internal data science roadmap
• Serving as the subject matter expert and spokesperson for queries in your area of expertise
• Promoting data science excellence through the team
• Promoting adoption of tools and best practices across the team
• Collecting requirements from a variety of stakeholders and other decision makers
• Translating use cases, pain points and success criteria into requirements
• Designing, building, maintaining and upgrading machine learning models

Skills and experience

• Strong experience in a relevant/similar role ideally in a similar sized scaleup environment.
• Solid business experience and awareness
• Experience mentoring/leading/growing a high performing team
• Excellent data science skills; python, machine learning, statistics, SQL
• A background in discovering and communicating requirements from a wide variety of stakeholders
• Experience managing data models  over time and evolving them to meet new business requirements

Why choose us

Our Culture

Our success is underpinned by our cultural values. These values are not something we stick up on a wall – they don’t need to be. They are behaviours that we recognise and celebrate in each other. They are what we live by every day.

Our Cultural Values

• Celebrate brilliance
• Take ownership
• Share Insights
• Look for a better way
• Support each other

Our values are driven through Culture Club – a staff team that rotates every quarter. Advocates for our culture as we grow, Culture Club activates ideas, makes improvements and helps everyone to connect.

Our office and remote working

We can confidently say that our sea-view office is one of Brighton’s best, and we’re really excited that we’ve been able to open up the office to our entire team again. It’s been great to reconnect with everyone in person and to meet the newer members of our team for the first time! 

Whilst we see huge benefits to being able to collaborate and socialise together again, we’ve also learnt a lot about the benefits of working from home. Therefore, we plan to offer our team the flexibility to be in the office when they want to be, and when they need to attend key meetings and workshops, and to work from home on the days when that suits their lives and their workloads best.

When in the office, we have flexible workspaces, which means you’re not tied to a desk, unless you want to be. You could work in a sociable spot on floor 4, or set yourself up with a screen on floor 3. This is everyone’s space and it’s available after work – our staff host everything from gaming and craft nights to adventure film screenings.

Benefits include

• Employee Assistance Programme (confidential counselling)
• Medicash healthcare scheme (reclaim costs for dental, physiotherapy, osteopathy and optical care)
• easitBrighton travel scheme (discounted public transport options)
• Cycle to work scheme
• Life Insurance scheme 
• 33 days holiday (including bank holidays)

Other extras in the office

• On site changing rooms, showers and internal bike storage
• Breakfast, fresh fruit, snacks, beers
• Yoga and other fitness activities
• Regular social events, including Friday drinks and book club
• Visits from friendly office dogs

For more information on what it's like to work at 15gifts, check out our Talent Talk with Wired Sussex