Principal Data Scientist
Location: London
Mode of working: Hybrid. Minimum 3 days/week in office.
Objective: AI Maturity
Above Role:
The Principal Data Scientist / AI Technical Lead works with established and highly capable ML teams to advance their technical maturity. This role provides deep technical leadership, challenges existing approaches, and helps teams push beyond baseline ML into more advanced, scalable, and performant solutions while remaining grounded in business value.
Key responsibilities:
- Advise on advanced model design and selection
- Support sophisticated feature engineering strategies
- Guide teams through complex experimentation and optimisation
- Provide leadership on deep learning approaches
- Support modern model architectures and advanced techniques
- Help teams assess when advanced approaches are appropriate
- Improve model performance, efficiency, and latency
- Support scaling models for larger datasets and higher throughput
- Optimise training and inference pipelines
- Provide deep guidance on production‑grade MLOps
- Support reliability, monitoring, and operational robustness
- Ensure models can be maintained and evolved over time
- Define and promote experimentation frameworks
- Support:
- A/B testing
- Model comparison strategies
- Reproducibility and governance
- Strengthen scientific rigour in ML delivery
- Act as a credible peer to senior and PhD‑level data scientists
- Confidently challenge and influence technical decisions
- Balance innovation with business practicality
Must‑have skills:
- Expert‑level Python in the ML stack
- Very strong, hands‑on ML experience
- Strong deep learning expertise
- Strong Databricks experience
- Deep understanding of MLOps in production environments
- Proven technical credibility and leadership
- Excellent problem‑solving and structured thinking abilities
- Excellent communication and stakeholder engagement
- Ability to self‑start and work proactively
- Strong business understanding and pragmatic delivery approach
- Patience, coaching mindset, and focus on stakeholder needs
Nice to have
- GenAI experience
The Cognizant community:
We are a high caliber team who appreciate and support one another. Our people uphold an energetic, collaborative and inclusive workplace where everyone can thrive.
- Cognizant is a global community with more than 300,000 associates around the world.
- We don’t just dream of a better way – we make it happen.
- We take care of our people, clients, company, communities and climate by doing what’s right.
- We foster an innovative environment where you can build the career path that’s right for you.
About us:
Cognizant (Nasdaq: CTSH) is an AI Builder and technology services provider, building the bridge between AI investment and enterprise value by building full-stack AI solutions for our clients. Our deep industry, process and engineering expertise enables us to build an organization’s unique context into technology systems that amplify human potential, realize tangible returns and keep global enterprises ahead in a fast-changing world. See how at www.cognizant.com or @cognizant.
Cognizant is an equal opportunity employer. Your application and candidacy will not be considered based on race, color, sex, religion, creed, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, genetic information, pregnancy, veteran status or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.
If you have a disability that requires reasonable accommodation to search for a job opening or submit an application, please email [email protected] for roles based in the Americas or [email protected] for roles based in India.
Disclaimer:
Compensation information is accurate as of the date of this posting. Cognizant reserves the right to modify this information at any time, subject to applicable law.
Applicants may be required to attend interviews in person or by video conference. In addition, candidates may be required to present their current state or government issued ID during each interview.