We are recruiting a Data Scientist (Maternity Cover) 12 months FTC

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.

Whatever it takes

Everyone works at Nesta because we are driven by a deep commitment to our missions. A guiding principle of our culture is that we do whatever it takes to achieve them, bringing our best to all our work. You can read more about our culture on our website.

How will you contribute to Nesta’s success?

We are looking for a Data Scientist to develop innovative methods leveraging data science and AI to impact our Missions and improve the practice of policymaking.

You will be a key contributor to our ‘Methods Discovery’ programme, where you will develop pipelines to scan innovation and policy trends around our Missions, and build tools to help policymakers make better use of research evidence.

Our work is highly varied, and could include training machine learning models, using large language models, building web applications, or using a range of analytical techniques to produce insights for research reports.

This is an opportunity to play a role in steering and delivering data science projects. If you have a strong background working with data 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.

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.

You will work closely with Nesta’s Data Science and Mission Discovery teams, a multi-disciplinary collective of data scientists, data engineers, researchers and foresight specialists.

You will also collaborate with other colleagues across Nesta such as specialists in our Mission areas, designers and policy experts.

You can read more about our work here:

• Tracking innovation trends
• Automated horizon scanning
• Generative AI

As a Data Scientist at Nesta you will:

• Deliver data-driven projects that advance Nesta’s missions and Methods Discovery programme. These projects may include the following:
  
  • Contributing to research and policy data collection and enrichment pipelines (eg, using Prefect workflow engine)
  • Using large language models to analyse and synthesise unstructured research and policy text data (eg, OpenAI API)
  • Developing reproducible analysis pipelines for delivering regular insights on innovation and policy trends in our Mission areas
  • Conducting custom analyses for Mission Discovery’s foresight publications
  • Prototyping web applications for exploring research and policy data (eg, using Streamlit, React or Ruby)
  • Supporting other projects with a direct impact on our Missions
• Steer projects in collaboration with technical colleagues, domain experts and practitioners from other disciplines;
• Communicate outputs of your work to a wide range of internal and external audiences;
• Ensure that all work is reproducible, sustainable, and ethically considered;
• 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.

The person

A strong candidate for this role will be interested in putting their analytical and data science skills to work to achieve impact in the public sector.

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 members across the team and wider organisation.

Skills and Qualifications

• A Bachelor or Masters qualification in a relevant quantitative discipline and 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

• Experience programming in Python
• Experience using data and evidence to drive better outcomes or business improvement;
• Strong data science skills, which might include machine learning, statistical methods, causal inference, large language models or other techniques;
• Willingness to be an active team member who collaborates with others and contributes to strengthening team connections;
• Ability to design data science approaches that will solve problems and answer questions;
• Ability to communicate with technical and non-technical stakeholders, with evidence of clear and structured written outputs such as blogs, reports or papers;
• Experience using Git and GitHub (or equivalent) for version control.

Desirable

• Domain knowledge in a field relevant to ones of Nesta’s mission would be a plus/beneficial;
• Proven 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;
• Experience delivering data science or analytics projects at pace;
• Experience communicating findings with a range of stakeholders;
• A degree of experience of data engineering methods such as scalable data collection (e.g. APIs, web-scraping), data pipeline technologies (e.g. Airflow, Luigi, Metaflow, Prefect) or database management systems (SQL or NoSQL).

What we offer

Salary: Circa £49K plus array of benefits, including private medical insurance, dental insurance, the ability to buy and sell annual leave, eyecare vouchers and more

Location: This role is based in London, hybrid working arrangement with a minimum of two days in the office

Term: Fixed term 12 months contract

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 for Discovery and Innovation

Making an application

To apply for this role, please submit your application before 8:00am (GMT+1) on 12 May 2025.

An introductory call, followed by a technical task and an interview will take place from week commencing 12 May 2025 onwards; exact dates to be confirmed.

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, job shares 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.