Senior Data Scientist – AI & Conversational Systems (RAG / LLMs) - £800 per day Outside IR35
Location: London / Hybrid
Day Rate: £600 - £800 Outside IR35
Length: 6 months (likely to extend)
About the Role
A leading media and data business is building a next-generation AI-powered conversational assistant designed to surface insights across both proprietary datasets and premium editorial content.
The organisation is seeking a Senior Data Scientist to help evolve this platform into a high-quality, production-grade system. The role focuses on improving answer quality, retrieval performance, and real-time responsiveness - translating cutting-edge LLM capabilities into reliable, user-facing products.
Responsibilities
* Develop and optimise RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) pipelines
* Design approaches that combine:
* Unstructured data (articles, reports, documents)
* Structured data (databases, SQL systems)
* Build and refine text-to-SQL capabilities
* Evaluate and improve LLM outputs:
* Accuracy, grounding, and hallucination reduction
* Retrieval relevance and ranking performance
* Design and implement evaluation frameworks (offline and online)
* Collaborate with engineering teams to deploy models into production environments
* Identify and solve real-world implementation challenges
* Contribute to shaping and executing a focused AI roadmap
Requirements
Essential:
* Proven experience delivering production-grade RAG systems
* Deep expertise in working with LLMs for high-quality answer generation
* Databricks experience
* Strong experience with both:
* Unstructured text data
* Structured data / SQL systems
* Experience in model evaluation, experimentation, and optimisation
* Ability to translate complex problems into scalable, practical solutions