Role summary

At Xephyr we help organisations scale results, not headcount, with AI and automation across AI Readiness and AI Agents. We’re looking for a Senior or emerging Lead Data Scientist with strong AI consulting instincts to join our AI Readiness team. This is a hands-on, client-facing role for someone equally comfortable in a code editor or in front of a client executive.

You’ll act as a trusted technical advisor on client engagements, lead the delivery of AI Readiness projects, shape AI strategies and run GenAI proof-of-concepts through to production. You’ll own project and stakeholder management on engagements you lead, and play a player-coach role internally, mentoring mid and junior data scientists. There are no direct reports at this stage; the role is a clear stepping stone toward Lead.

Responsibilities and duties

• Act as a trusted technical advisor to clients, including senior and C-suite stakeholders, across AI Readiness and delivery engagements.
• Lead the delivery of AI Readiness Audits, helping clients assess their data, tooling, capability and governance posture.
• Own end-to-end project and stakeholder management on engagements, including scoping, planning, timelines, risk and status reporting.
• Own solution architecture for ML and Generative AI work, including model selection, tool choice and production readiness.
• Design, build and deploy GenAI and ML solutions, including RAG, agentic systems, evaluation pipelines and guardrails alongside the engineering team.
• Ensure solutions are production-ready with appropriate LLMOps and MLOps practices: monitoring, evaluation, cost and latency trade-offs.
• Translate ambiguous client problems into scoped opportunities and contribute to estimates, proposals and statements of work.
• Support the sales motion through discovery sessions, workshops and technical pitches.
• Mentor mid and junior data scientists through code reviews, pairing, design reviews and knowledge sharing.
• Feed insights, patterns and reusable components from client work back into Xephyr’s GenAI product roadmap.

Ideal candidate

• 5 to 10 years in data science, ML or applied AI, with a track record of shipping solutions into production.
• Hands-on production GenAI experience: RAG, agents, tool use, evaluations and guardrails.
• Fluent with the modern GenAI stack (e.g. LangGraph or equivalent, LlamaIndex, vector DBs such as pgvector/Pinecone/Weaviate, evals frameworks like Ragas, Braintrust or LangSmith).
• Solid foundations in classical ML, statistics, experimental design and causal inference.
• Strong Python and SQL; comfortable with Git, CI/CD, testing and at least one major cloud AI platform (Snowflake, Bedrock, Vertex, Azure AI Foundry or Databricks).
• Working knowledge of modern data platforms, pipelines, warehousing, governance and quality.
• Demonstrated success working directly with clients; consulting or professional services background is a strong plus.
• Confident running engagements end-to-end, managing scope, timelines and stakeholder expectations.
• Clear communicator who can translate complex concepts for both technical teams and senior business stakeholders.
• Thrives in fast-moving environments with shifting priorities, evolving toolkits and volatile POCs.
• Tertiary qualifications in computer science, engineering, mathematics, statistics, physics or a related quantitative discipline. Postgraduate study in ML, AI or data science is a plus but not required.

Nice to haves or eager to learn on the job

• Experience working in a startup or scaleup technology business.
• Exposure to retail, marketing analytics or customer data platforms.
• Financial services industry experience.
• Responsible AI literacy: familiarity with frameworks such as the EU AI Act, Australia’s AI Safety Standard or the NIST AI RMF.
• Experience supporting pre-sales activity, including writing proposals and SOWs.
• Public contributions: talks, blogs or open-source work.

Our culture and core values

We’re building a culture where smart, kind, driven people can do their best work. Our values guide everything we do: human progress, iterate quickly, further together, be dependable, and have fun. If that sounds like a team you want to help shape, we’d love to meet you.

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