Manufacturing Data Scientist

Job title: Manufacturing Data Scientist

Reference: 50899

Location: Halewood, Merseyside

Duration: Permanent

Start date: ASAP

Salary: £46,587.88 pa + 33 days holiday per year (25 vacation & 8 bank holidays)

Employer: Ford Halewood Transmission Limited (FHTL) with GPW Recruitment partner

FHTL develops and manufactures transmissions with an employee workforce of circa 600. The plant has a 60-year history and is investing up to £230 million to transform for electric power units for future Ford all-electric vehicles.

• Salary of £46,587.88 pa
• 33 days holidays per year (25 vacation & 8 bank holidays)
• Hours: Monday to Thursday 07:00–15:30 and Friday 07:00–12:30
• FHTL employment benefits: free on-site gym (with sauna & steam room outside working hours)
• Employee assistance programmes: weekly appointments (e.g., massages, classes, nutrition advice, yoga, chiropody, reiki, head massages) outside working hours
• On-site physiotherapy and occupational health department
• Competitive pension scheme (company contributions up to 12% and 1.5x employee contributions)
• £750 annual attendance bonus (subject to company terms and conditions)
• Access Ford Privilege scheme for vehicle discounts
• Excellent work-life balance with generous holiday allowance
• Cycle to Work Scheme

A data science leader within Ford's manufacturing ecosystem who conceptualises, develops, and maintains a portfolio of data-driven products and projects at Halewood. The role delivers measurable improvements in plant efficiency, quality, and throughput by turning complex data into actionable insights for operators, engineers, and leadership. You will contribute to a growing digital/data science community, collaborate across Ford's central analytics network, and help scale successful solutions enterprise-wide. You will be responsible for conceptualising, developing and maintaining a range of manufacturing data science projects and products.

You will be part of the plant manufacturing team and the wider data science pillar in Ford, focusing on continuous improvement and adoption of insights across the site.

Essential:

• Degree level education in Mathematics/Statistics/Data Analytics/Computer Science or related field, or equivalent experience in an engineering/automotive environment
• Python expertise
• Experience with ML techniques
• Experience with statistical methodologies

Preferable:

• SQL proficiency
• Cloud computing proficiency

• Demonstrate Ford+ Behaviours in daily work: ownership, collaboration, customer focus, integrity, inclusion, and learning; role-model these behaviours in cross-functional projects and mentoring others
• Lead or co-lead cross-site analytics initiatives; share best practices and build a plant-level analytics playbook
• Data collection, transformation, governance: extract, transform, load, analyse, and report complex manufacturing data from multiple sources
• Establish and maintain data quality checks, metadata, lineage, governance, and security controls for trustworthy analytics
• Insight generation and storytelling: identify bottlenecks and drivers to improve OEE, yield, scrap reduction, downtime, cycle times, and energy usage; develop dashboards and visualisations for leadership, engineers, and operators; communicate findings clearly
• Modelling, experimentation, and impact: build and deploy predictive and prescriptive models (e.g., predictive maintenance, yield/defect forecasting, anomaly detection, capacity planning, SPC-aware models)
• Deployment, governance, and scale: operationalise models in the cloud with robust MLOps, versioning, monitoring, drift detection, retraining, and documentation; create model cards and explainability artifacts; develop scalable data pipelines and reusable analytics components; enable near real-time scoring and alerting
• Collaboration, enablement, and change management: partner with engineers, maintenance, quality, IT, production, and supply chain to translate analytics into actions; support pilots and scale solutions; provide analytics training
• Compliance, safety, and ethics: ensure data privacy, security, and regulatory alignment; promote data governance and safe, ethical use of data and models
• Communication and stakeholder engagement: translate technical results into business impact; tailor communications to varying statistical literacy; identify gaps and propose steps to close them
• People and capability development: contribute to building a digital/data science team and deploy analytics training across departments

Ford Motor Company is a global automotive leader with operations worldwide. The Ford+ plan aims to align the organisation to accelerate growth, reduce costs, introduce new technology, improve quality, and enhance efficiency.

Ford Halewood Transmission Limited (FHTL) develops and manufactures transmissions and employs about 600 people. The plant is investing up to £230 million to transform for electric power units.

The business invests in employee development and has a track record of promoting from within based on performance and achievement.

ASAP, based on personal availability if you accept the offer.

The Company is committed to diversity and equality of opportunity for all and opposes harassment or discrimination. This vacancy is advertised in line with the FORD equal opportunities policy.

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