Data Scientist Manager

JOB PROFILE DESCRIPTION 

Kainos is recognised as one of the UK’s leading AI and data businesses, with a decade-long track record of delivering impactful, production-grade AI solutions for clients across government, healthcare, defence and commercial sectors. Kainos is at the forefront of AI innovation, trusted by Microsoft, AWS, and others to deliver advanced AI and data solutions at citizen scale. 

Our 150-strong AI and Data Practice brings together deep expertise in machine learning, generative AI, agentic AI and data. We are pioneers in responsible AI, having authored the UK government’s AI Cyber Security Code of Practice implementation guide and we partner with leading organisations to ensure AI is deployed ethically, securely and with measurable business value. Our teams are at the cutting edge of AI research, and delivery, it is truly an exciting team to join Kainos as we further grow our AI capability. 

MAIN PURPOSE OF THE ROLE & RESPONSIBILITIES IN THE BUSINESS: 

As a Data Scientist Manager at Kainos, you’ll be responsible for successful delivery of advanced AI solutions leveraging state-of-the-art machine learning, generative and agentic AI technologies. You will drive the adoption of modern AI development and scalable cloud-native architectures. Your role will involve technical leadership, engaging with senior stakeholders to agree architectural principles, strategic direction and system architecture. As a technical leader within Kainos and wider industry, you will foster a culture of innovation, continuous learning, and engineering excellence. 

You will manage, coach and develop a team, with a focus on development of standards and policies, enduring customer relationships and embedding commercial acumen. You will also provide direction and leadership for your team as you solve challenging problems together. 

MINIMUM (ESSENTIAL) REQUIREMENTS: 

• A minimum of a 2.1 degree in Computer Science, AI, Data Science, Statistics or in a similar quantitative field. 

• Proven experience of leading multi-disciplinary teams to deliver high quality AI/ML solutions. 

• Demonstrable experience of technical leadership for AI delivery including architecture, product design principles and engineering excellence.   

• Have a deep understanding and developing of AI/ML models, including time series, supervised/unsupervised learning, reinforcement learning and LLMs. 

• Experience with the latest AI engineering approaches such as prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and agentic AI. 

• Strong Python skills with a grounding in software engineering best practices (CI/CD, testing, code reviews etc). 

• Expertise in data engineering for AI: handling large-scale, unstructured, and multimodal data.   

• Understanding of responsible AI principles, model interpretability and ethical considerations. 

• Strong interpersonal skills with the ability to lead client projects, manage C-level stakeholders and establish requirements/architecture concepts. 

• We are passionate about developing people, you will bring experience in managing, coaching and developing junior members of a team and wider community. 

DESIRABLE: 

• Demonstrable experience with modern deep learning frameworks (e.g. PyTorch, TensorFlow), fine-tuning or distillation of LLMs (e.g. GPT, Llama, Claude, Gemini), machine learning libraries (e.g. scikit-learn, XGBoost). 

• Experience with data storage for AI, vector databases, semantic search and knowledge graphs. 

• Actively contributes to open-source AI projects, research publications and industry events/websites.  

• Familiarity with AI security, privacy, and compliance standards e.g. ISO42001.