Lead Data Scientist

Description

The company tracks how brands are cited and recommended by AI platforms such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Mode and Claude, so marketing teams can see their position in AI answers and act on it. It is a UK AI search startup that has just raised $1.2m, led by SFC Capital, to build specialist AI agents trained on its GEO playbook, drawn from a year of client work.

The platform runs thousands of prompts a day across the major AI platforms and logs which brands are mentioned, which sources are cited, how brands are described and how this shifts over time. Over the first year more than 10 million AI answers were captured and analysed, and the volume keeps growing quickly, making it one of the richest datasets on AI search.

The platform already shows customers where they stand. What marketers still need is the reason an LLM picks one brand over another and what to do about it. The role is to answer that and move the platform from showing insight to driving action.

This is a lead data science role reporting to a founder. You would be the first data scientist, so you would define how data becomes insight. The data engineer handles capture, cleaning and storage, leaving your time for analysis and models.

Responsibilities

• Build a GEO playbook from the historic prompt data that explains what pushes LLMs toward recommending one brand over another, separating the real drivers across content, citations, sources and brand presence from factors that only appear to matter. Keep the playbook current as AI platforms change, for use by consultants and customers.
• Turn the recommendation engine into a product feature: work with product and engineering so recommendations are presented in a form customers trust and act on, and measure outcomes so results feed back into the engine.
• Build predictive models that estimate the likely impact of different actions for each customer, so priorities are clear and customers know what to tackle first.
• Explore new ways to transform and analyse the data, prototype quickly, share findings, and turn the strongest ideas into product features.
• This is not a reporting or dashboard role. You will ask sharper questions of the data than the team does today, then build the models and products that answer them.

Requirements

• Several years of hands-on data science experience, including taking models from analysis into production.
• Strong Python and SQL skills, with the ability to build the analysis and feature pipelines your models depend on.
• Experience in statistical modelling, causal inference or experimentation, and the judgement to separate correlation from cause in messy real-world data.
• Experience with recommendation systems, ranking or predictive modelling.
• Hands-on experience with LLMs and NLP, and a genuine interest in how AI platforms choose what to recommend.
• Able to explain complex findings clearly to marketers, consultants and founders, not only to other data scientists.
• Product-minded, focused on changes that improve a customer's results rather than on what is interesting to build.
• Comfortable owning a problem end to end in a small team and acting without being asked.
• Understanding of SEO or GEO.
• Must be based in the UK with the right to work here.

Conditions

Based in the UK with the right to work in the UK.

Lead role reporting to a founder.

Benefits

• Meaningful equity.
• Salary of £80,000 to £100,000.