Data Scientist - AI for BHL

We are seeking an experienced Data Scientist for a 12-month project to develop an AI-powered knowledge extraction and discovery platform for the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL). Working within the AI & Innovation team and with international BHL partners, you will help transform tens of millions of pages of biodiversity literature into a searchable, machine-readable research resource. You will support data-engineering activities including OCR processing, annotation workflows, data quality assurance, entity normalisation and preparation of training and evaluation datasets for LLM-based extraction.

We are looking for a data scientist with strong Python skills and experience building reproducible data and machine-learning pipelines. You will be confident working with OCR-derived and unstructured text, annotation workflows, entity normalisation and data quality assurance, and preparing datasets for NER, LLM extraction, training and evaluation. Familiarity with structured outputs, schema validation and knowledge graphs is desirable. You will be a collaborative, proactive team member, comfortable working with scientists, curators, technical teams and international partners.

Pulled from the full job description

• Employee discount
• Life insurance
• Company pension, * 27.5 days holiday plus 8 bank holidays (full time equivalent)
• Generous defined contribution Natural History Museum Pension Scheme (employer contribution 4 - 10%)
• Season ticket, bicycle and rental loan
• Life insurance
• Free admission to our exhibitions and many other paid exhibitions at museums, galleries and institutions across London and the UK.
• Staff discount at our Museum shops and cafes
• We offer a wide variety of training initiatives and opportunities to build skills. Investing in staff development is important to us, and we are ambitious about helping staff to grow and fulfil their potential.

We are a world-class visitor attraction and leading science research centre. We use the Museum’s unique collections and our unrivalled expertise to tackle the biggest challenges facing the world today. We care for more than 80 million objects spanning billions of years and welcome more than five million visitors annually and 16 million visits to our website.

Today the Museum is more relevant and influential than ever. By attracting people from a range of backgrounds to work for us, we can continue to look at the world with fresh eyes and find new ways of doing things.

We employ 1100 staff in a variety of roles, all united by our vision of a future where people and planet thrive. We need everyone to have the passion and drive to help us with our mission to create advocates for our planet and inspire millions to care about the natural world.

Diversity and inclusion matter to us.

Our vision is of a future where both people and the planet thrive. Diversity is one of our core values and we strive to build a workplace where everyone feels a sense of belonging. All new staff who join us learn about the importance of diversity and inclusion to the Museum and how to contribute to creating an inclusive environment.

We know we have more to do, but we are committed to ensuring that everyone who works at the Museum feels they can thrive and feel valued and respected.