Data Science Manager (UK)

We are invent.ai

invent.ai is a fast-growing company providing AI-Decisioning for Inventory, Merchandising and Pricing Optimization Solutions to retailers around the world. This is an exciting time at invent.ai, as we are growing our client base, our product portfolio, and our teams to revolutionize the supply chain planning industry.

We are a group of bright, kind, and goal-oriented people working together to make retail better. We take pride in what we do. As a provider of award-winning enterprise-AI SaaS solutions that serve a growing international business with customers across the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia, we make a measurable and meaningful difference for our customers every day.

Headquartered in the United States and with offices around the world, our team of 350+ people consists of young engineers and data scientists from top CS and engineering programs, collaborating across our Istanbul, Ankara, Philadelphia, and Amsterdam offices.

For more information, visit www.invent.ai

About the Role

invent.ai builds AI-driven planning solutions for retailers: demand forecasting, replenishment, allocation, markdown and promotions, as well as Merchandise Financial Planning (MFP) and Merchandise Assortment Planning (MAP). Our Client Excellence (CX) teams own live client accounts for the long term, after delivery hands them over.

CX EMEA runs the portfolio of live retail accounts in every region outside North America, including the UK and Europe. The team keeps daily runs healthy and explains to planners and merchandisers why the system recommended what it did. It also extends each solution as the client's business changes: new channels, hierarchies and business rules, and better accuracy in the categories that matter.

As a Data Science Manager, you will own a portfolio of live UK client accounts within CX EMEA. You are accountable for each account end to end: the health and results of the solution, the client relationship, and the team that works on it.

The role combines account leadership with real technical depth. You lead the data scientists and engineers on your accounts, and you are hands-on enough to review their code, trace a production issue and judge whether an output makes commercial sense.

You will work with Product, Platform and Delivery teams, and directly with client planning, merchandising and IT stakeholders.

Key Responsibilities

Account Ownership

• Own a portfolio of live UK client accounts end to end after handover from Delivery: solution health, results and the client relationship
• Be accountable for the KPIs agreed with each client, and report results to client management
• Run regular business and technical reviews with client planning, merchandising and IT teams
• Scope and estimate change requests and expansions, and lead them through to delivery

Retail and Commercial Judgement

• Judge whether forecasts, replenishment, allocation and markdown outputs make commercial sense, not only whether they are technically correct
• Connect merchandise financial plans and assortment plans to execution: how top-down sales, margin and stock targets, open-to-buy and range decisions flow down to store and SKU level
• Explain system recommendations to planners, merchandisers and buying teams in their language
• Lead the analysis around peak trading (Christmas, Black Friday, seasonal events), promotions, new stores and range changes
• Translate client business problems into model, rule and configuration changes

Account Team Leadership

• Lead the data scientists and engineers working on your accounts: priorities, reviews and day-to-day direction
• Review designs and code, and sign off on change risk before anything reaches a client's production run
• Uphold engineering standards: testing of client extensions, configuration hygiene, version pinning and what "done" means for a change
• Coach and develop the team, and share what works with other CX Managers across EMEA

Solution and Problem Ownership

• Design how client changes land (new feeds, hierarchies, channels, business rules) without destabilising what already runs
• Own the hardest investigations on your accounts, tracing an issue across the full chain: client feed, ETL, financial and assortment planning, forecasting, replenishment and allocation engines, UI parameters, reports and outbound files
• Improve methods that work but not well enough (forecast accuracy, new-store logic, season and scope rules, target caps), proving each change with a counterfactual and a before/after result
• Resolve performance, scale and cost problems in PySpark / Databricks pipelines
• Lead incidents and post-mortems through to a permanent fix
• Decide with Product, Platform and Delivery whether an issue is a client-side fix, a product defect or a feature request

Tools and AI

• Build tooling that makes your team faster: diagnostic dashboards, reconciliation and alert jobs, AI skills and agents
• Use AI workflows for investigation, status reporting and client updates, and help set AI working practices across CX EMEA

What success looks like

In Your First 6 Months:

• You know each account in your portfolio, its KPIs, its main risks and its key client stakeholders
• Client reviews and results reporting run on a regular cadence
• You have led at least one major investigation or incident to a permanent fix
• Your team uses shared diagnostic tools and AI workflows day to day

By 12 Months:

• The KPIs agreed with each client are on track and backed by evidence
• At least one accuracy or method improvement is live, proven with a counterfactual and a before/after result
• Your accounts have come through a peak trading season with no major unplanned incident
• Recurring tickets are down, incidents are resolved faster, and clients see you as a trusted technical and commercial partner

What We Are Looking For

Must-have Experience

• 10+ years of professional experience in data science, analytics or data engineering
• At least 5 years of that in retail, either at a retailer or delivering solutions to retailers
• Proven experience building or operating enterprise-scale AI/ML or analytics solutions in production
• Hands-on experience debugging production data pipelines end to end
• Experience in client-facing or senior stakeholder roles, including difficult conversations with business and IT teams
• Experience leading or mentoring data scientists and engineers
• Ability to work during UK business hours, with flexibility to collaborate with clients and teams across multiple time zones
• Must have the legal right to work in the United Kingdom.

Retail Expertise

Retail judgement is central to this role. We will look for evidence that you can:

• Look at a forecast, replenishment or allocation output and tell whether it makes sense for the business
• Reason about promotions, seasonality, peak trading, new stores, range changes and cannibalisation
• Work in depth in at least two retail planning domains: merchandise financial planning, assortment planning, forecasting, replenishment, allocation, transfer, markdown or promotions
• Explain a system's recommendation to planners and merchandisers, and turn their feedback into model or rule changes
• Experience with retailers in several international markets, including the UK, and in sectors such as grocery, health and beauty, pharmacy, fashion or general merchandise, is a strong advantage.

Technical Skills

• Strong hands-on Python and SQL, with production-level PySpark / Databricks experience
• Solid understanding of data architectures: data lakes, warehouses, ETL/ELT pipelines, orchestration, APIs and system integrations
• Experience with at least one major cloud platform (Azure, AWS or GCP), including cost optimisation
• Comfortable with a Git / pull-request workflow and reviewing other people's code
• Strong analytical skills: reconciliation, row-level tracing, counterfactuals and before/after measurement
• Ability to turn business requirements into technical designs and explain them clearly to technical and executive audiences

Nice to Have

• Orchestration tools such as Airflow
• Tableau, Datadog or similar monitoring and reporting tools
• Forecasting and optimisation methods at research depth
• Diagramming tools (Visio, Lucidchart, Draw.io, Miro)
• Experience at a retail software or analytics vendor

AI-first Requirements

CX EMEA is an AI-first team, and this role helps set how it works with AI. We are looking for someone who already uses AI to change real team workflows, not only for drafting or research.

We assess everyone against a four-level AI maturity framework:

L0 – Transactional: Uses AI only as a search engine

L1 – Copilot / Augmented: Uses AI for autocomplete, partial generation and day-to-day help

L2 – Agentic: Delegates isolated tasks to AI agents and runs multi-step AI workflows

L3 – Spec-Driven: AI-orchestrated execution from requirement to deployment

This role is expected to operate at L3. You should be able to show experience in:

• Orchestrating multi-step AI workflows across code, data, ticketing and communication tools for recurring work such as investigation, root-cause analysis, status reporting and client updates
• Building and maintaining reusable prompts, skills, plugins or agents that other people actually use
• Rigorous human-in-the-loop validation: an AI-generated answer is a hypothesis until live data, merged code or a production run confirms it, and it is checked before it reaches a client or a production decision.

Life at invent.ai

• Join great teammates across the globe: We consider ourselves anything but average!
• We love what we do: Our team has an exciting tech stack; Pyspark, Databricks, Python, and so on
• Flat organization with a very strong entrepreneurial culture,
• We support your career growth with Udemy, Medium, HBR and other learning tools
• At invent.ai, you have extra off days for different occasions (birthday, moving day, maternity & paternity leaves etc.)
• Great people make the perfect match: We have a powerful referral bonus for the friend you refer, bring to buddy!
• Work hard, play harder, unlimited fun at work: We love gaming and so have a Game Master at Invent! (We really mean it when we say we love it!)
• We believe that we will be more productive when we achieve our work-life balance. We support the Invent social clubs for their hobbies; painting, tennis, football and more!

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

invent.ai provides equal employment opportunities, and we strive for a diverse and inclusive workplace. We are together without discrimination of nationality, gender, belief, age, disability, marital status, sexual orientation. For us, diversity means embracing all the features that make us unique.

Corporate Social Responsibility

We care about social responsibility, invent.ai gives you the opportunity to make a real difference in people's lives.

• Support initiatives such as educational scholarships, donations, young talent sponsorships, and fundraising activities for non-governmental organizations.
• Have an Earthquake Fund, where invent.ai matches employee donations 1:1 to support underprivileged students.

Invent the Future with Us

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