About Nesta

We are Nesta, the UK’s innovation agency for social good. We design, test and scale solutions to society’s biggest problems. Our three missions are to give every child a fair start, help people live healthy lives, and create a sustainable future where the economy works for both people and the planet.

For over 20 years, we have worked to support, encourage and inspire innovation. We work in three roles: as an innovation partner working with frontline organisations to design and test new solutions, as a venture builder supporting new and early stage businesses, and as a system shaper creating the conditions for innovation.

Harnessing the rigour of science and the creativity of design, we work relentlessly to change millions of lives for the better. Find out more at nesta.org.uk.

The role

If you have a strong background delivering data-led projects and are motivated by deploying creative data science solutions, as well as contributing to real-world outcomes for public benefit, then this role is for you. Nesta’s Data Science team is looking for multiple data scientists at Data Scientist and Principal Data Scientist level to work on data science and analysis projects across Nesta’s three missions; a fairer start, a healthy life, and a sustainable future. Our work is highly varied, and could include training machine learning models, building web applications, or using a range of analytical techniques to answer questions and generate solutions to tough policy challenges.

The team

We are a team of analytical and technical experts from a range of backgrounds bound by the drive to use our expertise to have social impact. As a data scientist in our team, you will work across domain areas (for example Nesta’s mission areas) and deliver a mixture of short and long-term projects of varying complexity. Nesta’s data science team works as a ‘practice’, delivering across the breadth of Nesta’s work, whilst acting as a home for data scientists and engineers to develop technical competence in a supportive environment of collaborative and skilled people. There may also be an opportunity to work on a project with the Behavioural Insights Team, applying data science in a behavioural science context.

The person

A strong candidate for this role will have a track record of putting their analytical and data science skills to work to achieve impact in the public sector or in industry. They will be able to demonstrate owning and shaping the data science journey from sourcing data to end use by leaders, decision makers, or citizens. The successful candidate will have the ability to exercise significant range in the techniques they choose to deploy, and the ability to select the appropriate methods for the task at hand. They will be used to working flexibly and quickly, learning and adapting to new domain and project contexts. Critically, this role requires strong project delivery skills - the ability to get projects off the ground quickly and deliver them to a high standard while working collaboratively with other team members and wider organisation.

Diversity is our strength. If you are unsure whether your experience fits a ‘typical’ data scientist profile, but have valuable experience to offer, we are interested in hearing from you. For example, you might be a statistician who is also comfortable with predictive methods. You might be a data scientist who likes to dip their toes into engineering and who enjoys writing robust reproducible pipelines. Maybe you’re a data engineer looking to spend more time developing the range of analytical tools you are comfortable with. Get in touch with us at [email protected] - we’d be thrilled to answer your questions about your fit with the team.

In this role you will:

• lead and deliver data-driven projects that advance Nesta’s missions, ranging from research and analysis to model development;
• design, scope and deliver projects with technical colleagues, domain experts and practitioners from other disciplines;
• communicate the outputs of your work in a structured way (including written outputs like reports) to a wide range of internal and external audiences;
• help the team stay at the cutting edge by keeping abreast of new techniques and developments in the field and seeking ways to use them;
• alongside specialists in the Data Science Practice, ensure that all work takes advantage of data science to be reproducible, sustainable, and ethically considered.

Skills and qualifications

• A Bachelor or Masters qualification in a relevant quantitative discipline plus one or more years of relevant experience in academia, industry or public/third sector

Or

• At least three years of relevant experience in academia, industry or public/third sector

Plus

• Strong experience programming in Python;
• Experience using Git and GitHub (or equivalent) for version control;
• Experience using data and evidence to drive better outcomes or business improvement;
• Strong data analysis skills, which might include machine learning, statistical methods, causal inference or other techniques;
• Willingness to be an active team member who collaborates with others and contributes to strengthening team connections;
• Able to design data science approaches that will solve problems and answer questions;
• Strong project management experience, including the ability to lead projects, and make decisions and prioritise tasks to keep projects on track and ensure outputs are of a high quality;
• Ability to communicate with technical and non-technical stakeholders, with evidence of clear and structured written outputs such as blogs, reports or papers;
• Experience delivering data science or analytics projects at pace.

Desirable

• Domain knowledge in a field relevant to ones of Nesta’s mission.
• Experience of data engineering methods such as scalable data collection (e.g. APIs, web-scraping), data pipeline technologies (e.g. Airflow, Luigi, Metaflow) or database management systems (SQL or NoSQL);

What we offer

Salary: To be discussed depending on secondment arrangements.

Location: This role will be based in one of our offices (London, Cardiff, Edinburgh). We follow a hybrid working arrangement with a minimum of two days in the office.

Term: 3-9 months

Hours: This is a full-time role but we offer a range of flexible working arrangements and encourage our people to take advantage of them. Many do.

Reports to: Head of Data Science

Making an application

To apply for this role, please submit your application before 8:00 am on 10 June 2024.

Please note that interviews will take place on a rolling basis until the posts are filled.

At Nesta, we believe that a diverse workforce leads to an organisation that is more innovative, more creative and gets better results.

We want our workforce to represent the diversity of the people and communities we serve. We also want our workplace to be one where different experiences, expertise and perspectives are valued, and where everyone is encouraged to grow and develop.

This means that when we are recruiting, we actively seek to reach a diverse pool of candidates. It also means that we are happy to consider any reasonable adjustments that potential employees may need to in order to be successful.

We recognise the importance of a good balance between work and home life, so we do everything we can to accommodate flexible working, including working from home, compressed or part-time hours and other arrangements.

Please just let us know in your application or at any stage throughout the process (and beyond) if these are options you’d like to explore.