Data Scientist

Location: London / Applicants must have the right to work in the UK — Visa sponsorship is not available for this role

Employment type: Full-time

As a Data Scientist at the NEST Centre, you will be part of our Data Science Team, working at the intersection of Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, investigative journalism, and political science.

• Developing NLP pipelines and applications to extract structured data from texts (news articles, social media posts, etc.), disambiguate the extracted entities, and classify texts into categories of interest (e.g., topics, tags, sentiment classes).
• Building applications that automatically collect data on various entities from publicly available sources.
• Extracting actionable insights from collected and processed data to support the work of NEST Centre experts.
• Taking full ownership of the project: from conceptualisation and requirement gathering to writing production‑grade code and deployment.
• Monitoring, refactoring, and ongoing optimisation of deployed applications.

• Comfortable working in a privately funded, startup‑like environment, embracing its numerous uncertainties and responsibilities.
• A proactive, can‑do attitude with the ability to work independently and manage tasks with minimal supervision.
• Fluency in English and strong reading comprehension in Russian, due to the Centre’s focus and the nature of the data processed.
• Solid theoretical background and practical experience in Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing, with a track record of applying these skills to real‑world problems and delivering measurable value.
• Proficiency in the following technologies:
  • Machine Learning frameworks in Python
  • NLP frameworks such as Hugging Face (transformers, sentence-transformers, setfit) and/or others (e.g., Haystack, Flair)
  • SQL (PostgreSQL or equivalent dialects)
  • Vector databases
  • AWS services, especially Lambda, S3, DynamoDB, ECR, EC2, ECS, SQS, and SNS
  • Docker
  • Git and GitHub.
• Adherence to programming best practices and clean code standards.
• Ability to demonstrate expertise through open-source contributions, technical blog posts, online courses, or co-authored academic publications.
• Opportunities for professional growth and development.
• Dynamic multi-cultural team.
• Creating impact through projects that advance global cooperation and security.