Recruitment Data Scientist (Football)

As Recruitment Data Scientist, you will design and deploy the models, pipelines, and AI-powered workflows that help our Head of Recruitment and Director of Football identify, assess, and prioritise players. You will work with real data from best-in-class providers, have direct access to senior decision-makers, and - crucially - have genuine scope to build, not just maintain.

This is not a research role. The work you produce will directly influence recruitment decisions, shape squad-building strategy, and be presented to coaches and club leadership. If you want to see your work matter, this is the environment for it., Modelling & Analytics

*Develop and apply statistical models and player profiling frameworks, assessing candidate suitability against KPIs aligned with the club's tactical identity and style of play

*Build and refine player similarity and clustering models - using embedding-based or statistical approaches - to surface recruitment targets across defined positional archetypes

*Design expected-performance and projection models to evaluate players across different leagues, accounting for competitive level and sample size uncertainty

*Identify and monitor transfer market opportunities, including players approaching contract expiry, loan candidates, and undervalued assets relative to profile

AI-Powered Workflows

*Develop and deploy LLM-powered scouting tools - for example, systems that automatically generate structured player summary reports from statistical profiles or unstructured scouting notes

*Build retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines over internal scouting databases, enabling natural-language queries against recruitment records

*Automate repetitive analytical tasks so the recruitment team receives live, structured outputs - not end-of-week manual decks

Data Infrastructure

*Lead the maintenance and development of the club's recruitment database, ensuring data quality, consistency, and accessibility

*Build and maintain automated data pipelines from provider feeds (StatsBomb, Wyscout, SkillCorner or equivalent), transforming raw event, technical and physical data into analysis-ready formats

*Establish version-controlled, reproducible workflows so all analysis is auditable and transferable

Stakeholder Communication

*Build clear, compelling visualisations and dashboards that translate complex findings into actionable intelligence for coaches, scouts, and club executives

*Present analysis directly to the Head of Recruitment and Director of Football, participating in recruitment meetings and contributing to shortlisting decisions

*Work closely with video and live scouts to create feedback loops between qualitative scouting observations and quantitative modelling - bridging the gap between data and lived football judgement, *Experience with modern data orchestration tools (Airflow, Prefect, dbt) What We Offer

*Direct access to senior football operations leadership, with genuine influence over recruitment decisions

*A greenfield build - the opportunity to architect systems and workflows from the ground up, not inherit a legacy stack

*Access to best-in-class data provider feeds and a budget to support tooling and infrastructure

*A collaborative environment where data is genuinely valued - not used to post-hoc justify decisions already made

*Advanced proficiency in Python and the data science stack (pandas/polars, scikit-learn, NumPy, matplotlib/plotly)

*Strong SQL skills - ability to design schemas, write complex queries, and manage relational data across large datasets

*Demonstrated experience integrating LLM APIs (Anthropic, OpenAI, or equivalent) to build AI-assisted workflows, automated pipelines, or analytical tools

*Version control proficiency (Git) - all analytical work should be reproducible and code-reviewed

Statistical & Analytical Foundation

*Postgraduate qualification (Master's or equivalent) in Statistics, Applied Mathematics, Machine Learning, Data Science, or a closely related quantitative field - or demonstrated equivalent experience

*Deep understanding of statistical inference, uncertainty quantification, and the practical limits of small-sample sports data

*Ability to evaluate and communicate model limitations honestly - especially important in a football recruitment context where decisions carry significant financial and sporting risk

Communication & Collaboration

*Strong visualisation and communication skills, with a proven ability to translate complex technical findings into clear, actionable insights for non-technical stakeholders

*Comfortable presenting analysis to senior leadership and contributing to fast-paced recruitment decisions

*Ability to work collaboratively with scouts, coaches, and football operations staff who have varying levels of data literacy Desirable (Not Essential)

*Experience working with football-specific data providers - StatsBomb, Wyscout, SkillCorner, or equivalent - including event data, technical data, and physical data

*Prior experience in a professional football or broader sports analytics environment

*Familiarity with tracking data (e.g., StatsBomb 360, SkillCorner, Second Spectrum) and the additional modelling challenges it introduces

*Experience with vector databases or semantic search systems for unstructured data retrieval

*Exposure to cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure) for scalable data pipeline deployment

Leyton Orient is building a genuinely data-driven recruitment operation - one where statistical rigour, AI tooling, and traditional scouting judgement work in concert rather than in tension. This role sits at the centre of that ambition.