Senior Data Scientist - ML for Flight Ops & Experience

Manor Royal Business District; Crawley; Hybrid; GBP 85,000 - 115,000; Full time

Job summary

Virgin Atlantic is seeking a Senior Data Scientist in a hybrid role near Crawley, UK, to design, build, and productionise ML solutions that shape flight planning, operations, and customer experience. You’ll own projects end-to-end from problem definition to deployment and monitoring, influencing decisions across the airline.

You will lead ML initiatives, collaborate with data and ML engineers, and help define best practices while advancing GenAI and responsible-AI efforts.

Qualifications

• Proven experience delivering applied machine-learning projects in production.
• Proven record of deploying and maintaining ML models through CI/CD pipelines.
• Advanced proficiency in Python (pandas, scikit-learn, PySpark) and SQL.
• Demonstrable experience with ML lifecycle tooling such as MLflow and Databricks.
• Strong understanding of testing, version control, containerisation, and monitoring.
• A degree, PhD or post-doc in a quantitative field (statistics, mathematics, computer science, or related).

Responsibilities

• Lead end-to-end ML and optimisation projects, from concept through deployment and post-launch performance analysis.
• Build, test, and refine predictive and prescriptive models that deliver tangible business outcomes.
• Collaborate with data engineers and ML engineers to design robust pipelines integrated with CI/CD workflows, ensuring models are reproducible and continuously deployed.
• Implement monitoring and retraining frameworks to maintain model performance and governance over time.
• Contribute to our internal ML frameworks and tooling, streamlining experimentation, validation, and deployment at scale.
• Partner with stakeholders across the airline to translate complex analytical results into clear, actionable recommendations.
• Stay curious and up-to-date with ML, GenAI, and responsible-AI practices to drive innovation.

Skills

Python

SQL

CI/CD

ML lifecycle

Testing & version control

Containerisation

Education

Quantitative degree (BSc/MSc/PhD)

Tools

MLflow

Databricks

Job description

Virgin Atlantic is seeking a Senior Data Scientist in a hybrid role near Crawley, UK, to design, build, and productionise ML solutions that shape flight planning, operations, and customer experience. You’ll own projects end-to-end from problem definition to deployment and monitoring, influencing decisions across the airline.

You will lead ML initiatives, collaborate with data and ML engineers, and help define best practices while advancing GenAI and responsible-AI efforts.