Lead Applied AI Data Scientist

As Lead Applied AI Data Scientist, you’ll combine hands-on AI development with technical leadership. You’ll work directly with customers to understand complex operational challenges before turning those ideas into production AI solutions. You’ll mentor other data scientists, influence our technical direction and help shape the future of AI across Friend MTS. This is not a management role. It’s a technical leadership role.

What you’ll build You’ll help design intelligent systems that:

• Detect organised piracy at global scale
• Understand behavioural patterns across complex datasets
• Automate investigations using AI agents and LLMs
• Identify relationships hidden within billions of events
• Support analysts with AI-assisted decision making
• Create products used by broadcasters, sports organisations and streaming platforms worldwide

What you’ll do Every week is different. Some weeks you’ll spend most of your time writing Python. Other weeks you’ll be working with customers to understand problems that have never been solved before. You’ll regularly:

• Design and build production AI systems
• Lead complex technical initiatives
• Mentor Applied AI Data Scientists
• Work directly with customers
• Collaborate with Product and Engineering
• Evaluate emerging AI technologies
• Help define technical standards and best practices
• Influence the future direction of AI within Friend MTS, AI is becoming one of the core capabilities of Friend MTS. This is an opportunity to help build that capability from the ground up. You’ll work on challenging technical problems, influence the direction of our products and help define how AI is applied across the business. Your work will directly impact products used by many of the world’s leading broadcasters, sports organisations and streaming platforms. If you want to build practical AI that solves real-world problems-and help shape the future of an ambitious engineering organisation-we’d love to hear from you.

What We Offer

• 25 days of annual leave (Incl. Bank Holidays) + 1 day off for your birthday
• Enhanced Pension - 5% employee and 5% employer contribution
• Life Assurance - on the successful completion of your probation (4x your salary)
• BUPA (on the successful completion of your probation)
• Employee Assistance Programme
• Enhanced Maternity, Paternity and Adoption Leave (after a qualifying period)
• Various Learning and Development Platforms
• A flexible Benefits and Wellbeing Platform
• Full tech set up to ensure you have what you need to be successful in your role
• Weekly breakfasts in the office
• Mentorship: Direct access to senior data scientists and engineers in a supportive, high-growth environment.
• Impact: The chance to work on technology that protects some of the most valuable media rights in the world.
• Growth: A clear career progression path within a private-equity-backed, global tech company.

We’re not looking for someone who’s simply used every AI framework. We’re looking for technical leadership. Someone who enjoys solving difficult problems, helping others succeed and turning ambitious ideas into working software.

You’ll bring experience in:

• Building production AI systems
• Python
• Machine Learning
• Cloud platforms such as AWS
• Software engineering
• Technical leadership
• Working directly with customers

Experience with any of the following would be an advantage:

• LLMs
• AI Agents
• Graph analytics
• Behavioural modelling
• Cyber security
• Network intelligence
• PyTorch
• XGBoost

Our technology You’ll typically work with technologies including:

• Python
• SQL
• AWS
• PyTorch
• Scikit-learn
• XGBoost
• Docker
• Kubernetes
• Claude Code
• GitHub Copilot
• LLMs
• AI Agents

Here at Friend MTS, we are dedicated to nurturing and expanding a culture of belonging where everyone feels seen, heard, valued for who they are. By embracing the diversity of our people (and future people!) we achieve our best work, together. We ensure that at all stages of our hiring process, your education level, neurodivergence, background, race, religion, colour, sex, age, sexual orientation, national origin, or disability will not influence your chances for selection.