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Role: AI Engineer (data science & software)
Location: St Marys Stadium
Contract Type: Consultant – 6 months (full time hours)
Criminal Record Check: Basic
What is the role?
The role will architect, build and deliver the technical foundations of a digital information product to market within the football industry and will be an exciting opportunity for a founding engineer where you'll be hands-on building pipelines, APIs, and AI-powered features that scale globally, while shaping the engineering culture and standards.
What will you be doing?
You will act as the technical owner of the platform, collaborating with a wide range of stakeholders to evolve its capabilities and ensuring it delivers maximum value, whilst powering insights, automation and effective data to support data-driven decision making.
You will be responsible for building and maintaining the platforms core data pipelines and architecture, ensuring it is secure, reliable, and analytics ready, along with being the technical owner of the platform, collaborating with a wide range of stakeholders such as coaches, product leads and commercial teams to evolve its capabilities, ensuring it delivers maximum value to the club.
You will also:
* Write clean, tested and documented code.
* Build and maintain scalable data pipelines and work with cloud-based data platforms (Azure, AWS or GCP).
* Utilise and develop Python based services, internal tools and lightweight APIs to compile data analysis or automation, in addition to Azure data services and tiered data architectures.
* Leverage and embed AI/ML features to maximise efficiency and support in the delivery of the project.
* Monitor reliability, cost and quality whilst fixing issues fast and transparently.
Is this you?
In order to succeed in this consultancy role you'll need to be a creative builder, part data scientist, part software engineer, who is a problem solver and thrives on prototyping, iterating, and shipping solutions that balance speed, quality, and cost-efficiency.
Essential Skills and Experience:
* Strong Python skills for data engineering and analysis (pandas/PySpark, testing).
* Cloud data platforms (Azure preferred; AWS/GCP welcome).
* ETL/ELT design (dbt or equivalent), APIs/webhooks, JSON/Parquet fluency.
* AI/ML integration (model calls, evaluation, guardrails).
* Comfort with startup-style ambiguity where you are experienced in working in various roles within the project along with proven ability to ship end-to-end.
* Master's degree in data science or software engineering.
* Keen interest in football or sport.
Desirable Skills and Experience:
* Azure Data Factory/Synapse/Fabric; Databricks or Spark.
* N8N, Airflow, Prefect, or Dagster for orchestration.
* Streamlit/Gradio/FastAPI for rapid prototyping.
* Experience with feature stores, vector DBs, or search pipelines.
* Experimentation frameworks (A/B testing, causal inference).
How can I apply?
Just click on the apply button, enter your details and answer a quick pre-screening questionnaire, then attach your CV.
The closing date for this role is the 19th October 2025.
*We reserve the right to close this vacancy early, if a high volume of applicants are received. *