Senior Data Scientist

Marks & Spencer; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 55,000 - 75,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

20% colleague discount

Generous leave

Discretionary bonuses

Pension scheme

Training programmes

Wellbeing support

Volunteer day

Job summary

Marks & Spencer is seeking talented individuals to leverage machine learning and AI to enhance customer experiences. You will be responsible for developing systems for personalized recommendations and evaluating model outputs. The company prides itself on inclusivity and offers a vibrant work culture.

Enjoy competitive benefits including discounts, a discretionary bonus scheme, generous leave, and comprehensive wellbeing support. Join us and help drive change in retail.

Qualifications

• Proven track record of owning ML/AI problems from framing to deployment.
• Applies strong software engineering principles to build reliable ML systems.
• Experience with large-scale datasets and distributed data processing.
• Comfortable working across Product, Engineering, and business teams.

Responsibilities

• Use machine learning and AI to deliver personalized product recommendations.
• Design and develop end-to-end ML and GenAI systems.
• Create frameworks for evaluating LLM outputs.
• Collaborate to deliver production-ready solutions.
• Contribute to best practices in model development and monitoring.

Skills

Machine learning

Conversational AI

Software engineering

Data processing

Collaboration

Tools

Spark

Job description

What You’ll do

Your key accountabilities will include

• Use machine learning, recommender systems, and LLM-powered conversational AI to deliver deeply personalised product and outfit recommendations.
• Design, develop, and productionise end-to-end ML and GenAI systems, including retrieval, ranking, and LLM-based components powering conversational experiences
• Design and develop frameworks for evaluating LLM outputs (e.g. relevance, grounding, safety, and user satisfaction) and integrate them into continuous experimentation pipelines.
• Partner cross-functionally to deliver production-ready solutions aligned to product and commercial goals.
• Contribute to best practices in model development, deployment, and monitoring across the team.

Who you are

Your skills and experience will include

• Proven track record of owning ML/AI problems end-to-end — from framing and modelling through to production deployment, monitoring, and continuous improvement — delivering measurable business impact.
• Applies strong software engineering principles to build robust, scalable ML systems, taking responsibility for performance and reliability in production rather than handing off.
• Experience working with large-scale datasets and distributed data processing (e.g. Spark), and with modern recommendation or personalisation systems (e.g. large‑scale retrieval and ranking architectures, real-time inference, vector representations, approximate nearest‑neighbour search) at scale.
• Strong collaborator and communicator, comfortable working across Product, Engineering, and business teams.

What's in it for you

Being a part of M&S is exactly that – playing your part to bring the magic of M&S to our customers every day. We’re an inclusive, dynamic, exciting, and ever evolving business built on doing the right thing and bringing exceptional quality, value, service to every customer, whenever, wherever and however they want to shop with us.

Here are some of the benefits we offer that make working for M&S just that little bit more special…

• After completing your probationary period, you’ll receive 20% colleague discount across all M&S products and many of our third‑party brands for you and a member of your household.
• Competitive holiday entitlement with the potential to buy extra holiday days!
• Discretionary bonus schemes awarded based on how you achieve your personal objectives and our performance as a business.
• A generous Defined Contribution Pension Scheme and Life Assurance.
• A dedicated welcome to our teams with a tailored induction and a wide range of training programmes to develop your skills.
• Amazing perks and discounts via our M&S Choices portal to maximise your financial and personal wellbeing.
• Industry‑leading parental, adoption and neonatal policies, providing support and flexibility for your family.
• Access to a fantastic range of wellbeing support for all colleagues including access to our 24/7 Virtual GP and PAM Assist to support you and your family.
• A charity volunteer day to support a charity or cause you're passionate about through a dedicated day away from work.

Everyone's welcome

We are ambitious about the future of retail. We’re disrupting, innovating and leading the industry into a more conscientious, inspiring digital era. We’re transforming how we work together and offering our most exciting opportunities yet. Marks & Spencer strives to be an inclusive organisation, trusted and admired by our colleagues, customers and suppliers. Join us and make change happen.

We are committed to building diverse and representative teams, where everyone can bring their whole selves to work and be at their best. We support each other and work together to win together.

If you feel you'd benefit from any support or reasonable adjustments during any stage of the recruitment process, please don’t hesitate to let us know when completing your application. This information will be picked up by our team, so we can try and put steps in place to help you be at your best through this process.

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