Senior Research Data Scientist

dunnhumby is the global leader in Customer Data Science, partnering with the world’s most ambitious retailers and brands to put the customer at the heart of every decision. We combine deep insight, advanced technology, and close collaboration to help our clients grow, innovate, and deliver measurable value for their customers. dunnhumby employs nearly 2,500 experts in offices throughout Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas working for transformative, iconic brands such as Tesco, Coca-Cola, Nestlé, Unilever and Metro. Joining the AI Strategy, Research & Enablement team, you’ll help shape the future of AI across the organisation. Working at the intersection of cutting-edge research and real-world commercial application, you’ll turn innovative ideas into scalable capabilities that influence products, platforms, and long-term strategy. You’ll collaborate with senior leaders and contribute to decision-making across data science, engineering, and product, helping to prioritise and advance the right AI investments for the future. We’re looking for a Senior Research Data Scientist to play a key role in developing dunnhumby’s next-generation models across a range of strategic AI initiatives. As part of this newly formed team, you’ll focus on advanced modelling, long-term capability building, and cross-industry collaboration. You’ll design new approaches, build and test prototypes, support engineering teams with productionisation, and contribute to partnerships with academia and external research organisations. What you’ll be doing: • Drive the design, experimentation, and evaluation of transformer-based models on retail based challenges. • Explore innovative architectures (e.g., sequence-to-sequence models, causal transformers, hybrid retrieval + transformer approaches) to deliver step-change improvements in personalisation, recommendations, and forecasting. • Develop research-grade prototypes and collaborate with engineers to translate them into scalable, production-ready solutions. • Conduct forward-looking research on generative AI, multimodal learning, and representation learning. • Identify emerging AI/ML techniques with high potential for retail and consumer analytics, shaping conceptual prototypes and feasibility assessments. • Drive internal thought leadership by defining standards, sharing knowledge, and advising product, engineering, and data science teams on ML adoption and best practices. • Work with leading academic groups and private-sector research partners to co-develop new modelling approaches, run joint experiments, or explore cutting-edge AI applications. • Mentor other data scientists and contribute to growing organisational capability in deep learning and advanced ML. • Partner closely with internal teams to ensure research pathways are aligned with available tooling and future platform strategy. • Document best practices and contribute to reusable assets, libraries, and internal frameworks. What we expect from you: • Expertise in transformer architectures (e.g., BERT, GPT, T5, Time‑Series Transformers). • Strong hands-on experience with mo