Senior Data Scientist

We are seeking a skilled Data Scientist to join our AI Squad and play a key role in building the analytical and predictive capabilities that power Benifex products. You will work closely with engineers, product managers, and data stakeholders to develop models that turn our HR and benefits data into meaningful insights for our customers.

This is a hands-on role focused on forecasting, statistical modelling, exploratory analysis, and applied machine learning. You will contribute to the intelligence behind Brain, our HR AI assistant, helping ensure that the insights we deliver are accurate, reliable, and actionable.

You will join a collaborative team across Cebu and the UK, working in a dynamic environment where we solve complex problems together and continuously learn.

Responsibilities

The focus for the next 12 months will be:

• Design and build forecasting and predictive models for benefits spend, cost drivers, headcount trends, and benefit utilisation.
• Conduct exploratory data analysis to uncover patterns, anomalies, and drivers within our HR and benefits datasets.
• Develop well-structured feature sets and work with Data Engineering to improve data readiness and data quality.
• Create evaluation and benchmarking frameworks to assess model performance, identify drift, and improve reliability over time.
• Communicate insights, modelling decisions, and trade-offs clearly to AI, Product, and Data teams.
• Support the refinement of AI components by improving model inputs, analysing outcomes, and feeding insights into AI system improvements.
• Stay up to date with developments in statistics, forecasting techniques, and applied machine learning.

LLM-focused activities (secondary):

• Support evaluation of LLM outputs through structured benchmarking.
• Contribute to improvements in retrieval and context pipelines by analysing data and output behaviour.
• Help optimise prompts and model inputs where modelling intersects with LLM tasks.

Do you have a Master's degree?, * Strong hands-on experience in Python for data analysis and shallow and deep machine modelling, using libraries such as NumPy, Pandas, scikit-learn, TensorFlow or PyTorch.

• Experience building forecasting and predictive models with clear understanding of time-series techniques and model validation.
• Strong grounding in statistical analysis and exploratory data techniques.
• Experience designing or contributing to model evaluation frameworks, including accuracy, stability, and drift metrics.
• Solid understanding of data preparation, data quality, and feature engineering.
• Ability to communicate modelling approaches and insights to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Comfortable working in a collaborative, cross-functional environment where models inform product decisions.

Bonus Points:

• Experience working with HR, finance, or operational datasets.
• Familiarity with embeddings or retrieval methods, especially where they support downstream modelling.
• Exposure to LLM evaluation or prompt optimisation.
• Awareness of basic ML engineering principles for deploying or packaging models, even if you are not responsible for full MLOps.
• Experience with cloud environments or BI tools.
• Exposure backend engineering, including REST APIs (Java, Springboot) and full-stack architecture.

• Challenge: Implement a scalable data platform to meet our internal and external analytics needs
• Impact: Be one of the first hires to help build a world class data engineering function.
• Scale: A key pillar of our global growth plan is data, allowing us to make better decisions and deliver more value to our users
• Sunday Times Best Place to Work 2025 and Best Large Tech Company to Work for 2025
• Work for a profitable, fast-growing market leader in the online reward and benefits space

Please note we are unable to offer visa sponsorship and require to people to be based in the UK or Ireland for this position

Great benefits:

£70,000-90,000

Tech setup of your choice (MacBook Pro or equivalent, monitors, etc.)

£/€800 annual learning budget, plus two hours per week as 'Focus Fridays'.

Flexible work - choose a working setup that works for you, our only ask is to see you once a month in the office and you must be based in the UK or Ireland.

Full access to our comprehensive benefits package, including discounts from hundreds of high street brands, salary sacrifice schemes across Finance, Health, Tech, and more

️ 25 days holiday plus your local bank holidays

Your birthday off

️ Two half day wellbeing days

Healthcare cash plan to cover the costs of day-to-day healthcare

Employee Assistance Plan 24/7 365 support

Income Protection (75%) and life assurance (4x salary)

Referral bonuses

Enhanced parental leave package - 26 weeks fully paid maternity leave and 4 weeks fully paid paternity leave

️ Work from Anywhere policy for 90 days

️ Buy and Sell scheme for holidays

£50 monthly allowance to spend on whatever takes your fancy, your very own Benifex card will be topped up at the start of each month!

We are a fast-moving technology company, and one of the most successful providers of online reward and benefits solutions in the world. We believe that everyone deserves an exceptional experience at work, every day, and build workplace technology that makes this happen. Benifex's mission is to build remarkable experiences that employees love. Today Benifex supports more than five million employees in over 3,000 organisations across more than 100 countries. To help us on our quest to be the best, we need brilliant people on board and that's where you come in.