Data Scientist

Contract Role: Data Scientist (with Strong Engineering Capability) • Location: Remote/Hybrid (UK-based) • Day Rate:£550 - £600 • Duration: 6 months (may finish earlier) • Start Date: ASAP • IR35: Outside IR35 (TBC) Overview A UK-based retail organisation is seeking a contract Data Scientist to support the delivery of a robust, production-ready daily forecasting solution to improve warehouse labour planning. The project is fully budgeted and urgent due to internal capacity constraints. You will be embedded in an experienced data science team and work closely with logistics stakeholders to design and implement a scalable forecasting system. The role focuses on delivering real business impact with clean handover and strong documentation. Business Context • Forecasting required for distribution centres • Current labour planning is manual and inefficient • Need to forecast workforce demand (e.g. pallets per person) based on product movement • Forecasting over a 6-week horizon, daily, by product group and warehouse zone • Solution should be robust, scalable, and production-grade Key Responsibilities • Design and deploy a time series forecasting system using Databricks on Azure, with data in Snowflake • Translate logistics needs into data science solutions • Collaborate with other data scientists and dashboard developers • Incorporate monitoring, error handling, and environment separation (dev/test/prod) • Deliver clean code with CI/CD pipelines and production-readiness Technical Skills Required: • Strong Python (in a production environment) • Experience with Databricks, Azure, Snowflake • Time series forecasting, ideally in operations or logistics • Understanding of software engineering best practices (e.g. modularity, testing, version control) Desirable: • PyTorch (for neural forecasting models) • Experience with Spark, Azure DevOps, CI/CD • Knowledge of advanced forecasting architectures (seq2seq, transformers)