Senior Data Scientist (Natural Language Processing)

Put your career on the map

Grade: SEO Total remuneration: £62,301-£73,353 Pay Supplement: The base salary for this role is £54,262-£63,888. This job qualifies for Digital, Data and Technology Annual Pay supplement 24% is included in the total remuneration above.    Pension: 28.97% (RoS contribution) Annual leave: 38 days annual holiday, increasing to 42 days with length of service. Duration: Permanent Working Pattern: 35 hours per week. We are a flexible employer and will consider a variety of working patterns on a case-by-case basis. For example, compressed hours, term-time working or part-time working. Location: Hybrid working model. Contractual base either at Meadowbank House, Edinburgh (EH8 7AU), or St Vincent Plaza, Glasgow (G2 5LD). You will be expected to attend one of these locations as required by the role and will have in person learning during your induction period. Department: Data BU Directorate: Digital, Data and Technology Closing date: Thursday 1 October at 23:59 Number of vacancies: One

About Registers of Scotland (RoS) Join an award-winning organisation recognised for its technology and innovation. RoS is a world-leading pioneer in land and property registration. We work to create data-led, digital solutions for the people of Scotland. Our full-stack teams design, architect, and build all our registration products in-house.

The role This role is about progressing the adoption of data-driven methods, machine learning and AI more widely within the business. You will work with a range of colleagues and teams to help solve complex business problems, unlock business insight and value from semi-structured and structured data, support data-driven decision-making and develop new data products and models. The post-holder will not have initial line management responsibilities, but this may change as the team grows.

On a typical day you will…

• Work closely with a range of colleagues, including product managers, data engineers, subject matter experts, and business analysts to identify, formulate and solve business problems.
• Develop credible rule- or model- based methodologies to discover knowledge, train models, help create data products, data-driven tools and reports and to support data quality improvement activities.
• Explore, analyse and transform complex land and property data in a range of formats and structures and in particular, process semi- or unstructured legal text to detect, classify and extract information.
• Document methodologies to deliver reproducible and explainable work.
• Use suitable evaluation strategies, metrics and error analysis to evaluate outputs.
• Gather feedback and monitor the continued performance and accuracy of outputs, including ML models, as applicable.
• Build understanding of Registers of Scotland data, business processes, strategic objectives and the policy environment in which we operate.
• Draw on government and industry technical/analytical standards and frameworks and adhere to the UK Government data ethics framework.
• Communicate insights and results to technical and non-technical audiences using presentations, data visualisation and data storytelling.
• Build awareness of technical, regulatory and social developments in industry.
• Support development of the team by participating in strategy development, communities of practice, staff management and team capability building.

This job is for you if you want…

· Work with purpose: working for the people of Scotland to set the bar for land and property registration worldwide.

· Flexible and hybrid working: depending on the role and team requirements, work when and where it’s best for you and your stakeholders.

· Benefits: enjoy pay progression, pension contributions of up to 28.97%, up to a year’s parental leave, and 38 days annual holiday, increasing to 42 days with length of service.

· Investment in professional development: we invest in all our people so that they have the right skills to be productive and confident in their job.

· Diversity and Inclusion: We are an ‘Investor in People’ and a ‘Disability Confident’ employer. We are inclusive, stronger together, and committed to putting our people first.

· Positive work culture: RoS is an agile, digital organisation using leading-edge technology. Colleagues understand their role in achieving our strategy and have the autonomy to deliver.

To learn more about RoS and what we offer visit our careers pages or watch this short video

Hear directly from our colleagues about their experience of working within our Digital, Data and Technology teams on our website.

Our Tech stack

• Backend: Java, Python and Spring Boots
• Frontend: JavaScript, React and Typescript
• DevOps: AWS. CI/CD, Kubernetes and OpenShift
• AWS: AWS SNS, Comprehend, EC2, Lambdas, RDS, SageMaker and Textract
• Data: Hadoop, Microsoft SQL Server, Pandas, PowerBI, PostgreSQL, Pytorch, Spark, TensorFlow and Tableau

Essential Criteria – Skills and Attributes for Success

Experience/Technical: We will assess you against the following Experience and Technical skills during the application and assessment process:

Technical

• Background in a quantitative field e.g. Data Science, Computer Science, Digital Linguistics or a related field.
• Broad awareness of data science tools and approaches.
• In-depth knowledge of language processing tools and techniques e.g. text preprocessing, syntactic analysis and semantic analysis.
• In-depth knowledge of deep learning/transformer architectures (e.g. BERT), domain adaptation and task-specific model training.
• Knowledge or experience of working with very large foundational models, e.g. augmentation for textual analysis or instruction tuning.
• Working understanding of MLOps workflows and ability to perform the basics of model deployment without MLOps support.
• Familiarity/experience of cloud-based platforms (e.g. AWS SageMaker).
• Proficient at SQL querying, including text search.
• Proficient in coding for data science using Python.
• Experience working with commonly used data science libraries and frameworks, e.g. Spacy, scikit-learn, Keras/TensorFlow, PyTorch, LangChain, Huggingface Transformers etc.
• Demonstrates good coding/engineering practice. Comfortable working in a Linux environment.

Experience

• Proven ability to acquire business/domain understanding required for tasks (experience working with legal text data would be an advantage).
• Experience of text mining, data annotation and the development of training data for supervised model training.
• Experience working within an Agile delivery context.
• Strong and critical ability to select, combine and apply rule-based and model development approaches to complex business problems.
• Demonstrable awareness of Data and AI Governance considerations in a highly regulated environment.

Behaviours

At application stage, you will be scored against the bolded Behaviours and against all Behaviours for the assessment:

Seeing the Big Picture/Making Effective Decisions (cluster)

• Understand organisational priorities and align analytical solutions to strategic objectives.
• Use evidence and appropriate analytical approaches to solve complex problems, while considering ethical, regulatory and governance requirements.

Changing and Improving/Managing a Quality Service (cluster)

• Apply new technologies and methods to deliver business improvement.
• Identify opportunities to enhance data quality, models and services.
• Balance stakeholder priorities, feedback and delivery timescales to provide a high-quality service.

Communicating and Influencing

• Communicate complex technical concepts clearly to a range of audiences.
• Present insights and recommendations that support informed decision-making.

Working Together

• Work collaboratively with technical and business colleagues to solve complex problems.
• Share expertise and contribute to team capability and continuous improvement.

Stage one - Application Process To apply, click on 'Apply now' and complete the online application form. You will need to submit:

• A CV outlining your career history and how you meet the technical/experience criteria (max 4 pages).
• Responses explaining how you meet the bolded behavioural aspects of the role and an example of a Natural Language Process (NLP) project that you have worked on (aligned to the technical/experience criteria). Maximum 300 words per answer in the spaces provided and using the STAR format is recommended.
• After the deadline for applications, all applicants be sent a short on-line test via the platform HackerRank, which will assess your basic technical proficiency. You will have 72 hours in which to complete this.

Please note:

• If we receive a high volume of applications, we may complete an initial sift on the Technical and Experience Criteria and technical proficiency test.
• We reserve the right to invite candidates to participate in a telephone interview prior to being further assessed. 
• Applications that are not accompanied by CVs or responses exceeding 300 words per behaviour will not be considered.
• Applicants who do not complete the online assessment will not be considered.
• We would strongly recommend that your examples are written in the STAR format (Situation, Task, Action & Result) and suggest preparing your answers using software such as MS Word or Google Docs, and then uploading the file. 
• We strongly advise you review our policy on responsible use of AI in the application process. RoS may contact you for a pre-screening call to verify your responses. 
• Applications and appointments are subject to a strict merit-based assessment process, in line with the Civil Service Recruitment Principles. 

Stage two – assessment If successful at application stage, you will be invited to an in-person interview which will include the following:

· Behaviour based interview

· Further technical whiteboarding exercise

Behaviour-based interview questions will be shared with candidates 15 minutes before the assessment begins. This will allow you time to review them and think about the examples you want to use, and how to position them.

Guidance on Interview Notes

• You

are welcome to bring notes with you to the interview

• Notes

can be either handwritten or typed

• Notes

should consist of brief prompts, such as key words or bullet points, to help you structure your responses rather than complete answers

• The

interview is a conversation, and we are interested in hearing about your experiences in your own words

Information on Success Profiles

For further information on success profiles, visit our Success Profiles.

Recruitment timeline

• Closing date: Thursday 1 October at 23:59
• Online test sent: Friday 2 October
• Online test deadline: Sunday 4 October
• Application sift: W/C 5 October
• Invites to assessment: W/C 12 October
• Interviews: W/C 19 October

Please note dates may be subject to change.

Feedback Feedback will only be provided if you progress to interview stage.

Reserve List In the event that further posts are required, a reserve list of successful candidates will be kept for up to 12 months.

Nationality and immigration status In general, only nationals from the following countries (and associations of countries) are eligible for employment in the Civil Service: the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland, and the Commonwealth. EU nationals (with settled or pre-settled status), certain EEA nationals, Swiss and Turkish nationals are also eligible for employment. Detailed provisions on determining eligibility on the grounds of nationality and, where relevant, immigration status can be reviewed here.

Security Successful candidates must undergo a Basic Level 1 Disclosure check. Individuals working with government assets must complete baseline personnel security standard checks.

Diversity and inclusion

As a proud member of the Disability Confident Scheme, we welcome applications from disabled candidates. We’re not as diverse as we’d like yet, and we’re working on it. We especially welcome applications from underrepresented groups – people who are disabled, minoritised ethnic groups, and younger people (16-24 years of age). To learn more, please see our EDI strategy.

As part of the application process, we would like to invite you to please complete our diversity monitoring form. This information is not shared with recruitment panels but will allow us to further improve our processes to increase diversity.

Reasonable adjustments

We want everyone to have the chance to perform at their best. If you need any adjustments (for example, extra time, a hearing loop, materials in large font) in any part of our recruitment process, please get in touch via talent@ros.gov.uk. We will discuss adjustments individually with any candidates who request these.

Find out more about reasonable adjustments on this page

Further information For further information relating to RoS, including:

· Additional details on pay & benefits

· The Civil Service Code

· Complaints process

· Use of AI in the application/recruitment process,

Please view our additional information page online

If you have any questions, please contact talent@ros.gov.uk