Data Scientist - AI for BHL

Natural History Museum; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 65,000 - 90,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

27.5 days holiday + bank holidays

Pension scheme (DC)

Season ticket/transport benefits

Life insurance

Exhibition access & discounts

Staff discount

Training & development opportunities

CSSC membership

Sports & Social Association

Job summary

Natural History Museum in London seeks an experienced Data Scientist for a 12‑month project to build an AI-powered knowledge extraction platform. You will work with OCR-derived text, annotation workflows, data quality assurance, and prepare datasets for NER and LLM extraction.

You will contribute to reproducible data pipelines using Python, collaborate with scientists, curators, and international partners, and help translate biodiversity literature into a searchable research resource.

Qualifications

• Strong Python skills and experience building reproducible data and ML pipelines.
• Experience with OCR-derived/unstructured text, annotation workflows, entity normalisation and data quality assurance.
• Preparing datasets for NER, LLM-based extraction, training and evaluation.
• Familiarity with structured outputs, schema validation and knowledge graphs is desirable.

Responsibilities

• Develop an AI-powered knowledge extraction platform for biodiversity literature.
• Support OCR processing, annotation workflows, data quality assurance and dataset preparation for LLM extraction.

Skills

Python

Data pipelines

OCR processing

NER/LLM preparation

Knowledge graphs

Job description

About Us

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.

About Us

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.

About The Role

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.

About You

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.

Thriving at the Museum: the way we work

We are proud to work at the Museum and have identified the qualities we all need to embody to reach our shared ambition. This sits alongside the Museum’s values and forms the framework for the way we work.

Find out more here

What We Offer

• 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.
• Affordable membership to the Civil Service Sports Council which offers a range of benefits including an extensive list of special offers and reduced entry fees at a selection of cinema chains, theme parks, theatres, retailers and supermarkets. It also provides entry to up to 300 English Heritage sites and other national treasures. For more details, visit https://www.cssc.co.uk
• Membership to our Sports and Social Association (for a small fee), which includes access to our in-house gym and clubs such as football, softball, table tennis and tennis and classes in Middle Eastern dance, yoga and Tai Chi

Hybrid working

We are working towards a vision where both people and planet thrive, and nothing gives a greater connection with this, than seeing first-hand, the visitors, scientific research and collections that all of our work is inspired by and working side by side with the teams delivering the visitor experience and events. We also recognise the benefits and flexibility that hybrid working brings. We operate a hybrid working model that requires regular, weekly attendance for this role, with the precise pattern of days on site and worked from home to be agreed with your manager.