National AI Awards 2025Discover AI's trailblazers! Join us to celebrate innovation and nominate industry leaders.

Nominate & Attend

Principal Data Scientist

Hiscox
London
6 days ago
Create job alert

Social network you want to login/join with:

As a Principal Data Scientist at Hiscox, you will play a pivotal role as a critical thinker for Hiscox, applying your deep expertise to address our most intricate business challenges and uncover significant opportunities within our data landscape. You will utilise your technical skills and innovative mindset to tackle complex business problems and identify opportunities for growth. Additionally, you will provide ad hoc analysis and develop predictive and prescriptive models to foster a data-driven culture within Hiscox.

You will act as a technical mentor and guide to our team members, fostering best practices, elevating coding standards, and driving advanced analytical techniques across the team. Your ability to translate complex technical findings into clear, actionable insights for diverse stakeholders will be essential, ensuring alignment between our advanced solutions and specific business needs. Operating within a dynamic and evolving environment, you will play a key role in continuously advancing our technical capabilities and ensuring the effective application of data science across the insurance value chain.

The role

As a Principal Data Scientist, you will be an integral part of a dynamic technical team, strategically focused on leveraging data science across our diverse business functions. While your expertise will be pivotal in transforming our underwriting capabilities, your influence will extend across the entire insurance value chain, championing a multi-disciplinary approach to complex problem-solving.

You will lead the end-to-end delivery of our most significant and complex data science initiatives, driving technical strategy, architecture, and best practices. You'll be a key driver in defining and upholding technical standards, ensuring the development of robust, scalable, and high-quality solutions that enable fast, impactful delivery to stakeholders. Beyond project leadership, you will act as a crucial mentor and coach, fostering technical growth and expertise among junior and mid-level colleagues, elevating the overall capability of the team. Crucially, you will collaborate extensively with other disciplines to ensure a holistic view is considered, facilitating smooth delivery and maximising business value.

Key Responsibilities:

· Utilise industry standards, emerging methodologies, and empirical research to develop critical business inputs and assist leaders in innovating their approaches.

· Technically lead the end-to-end delivery of our most complex data science initiatives, encompassing:

o Strong understanding of intricate business challenges and translation into technical problem statements.

o Working with diverse datasets, both internal and external.

o Expert application and development of advanced machine learning or statistical modelling techniques to generate actionable insights and deliver measurable impact.

· Provide hands-on technical mentorship and guidance to junior and mid-level data scientists, fostering best practices, elevating technical standards, and cultivating advanced skill development within the team.

· Engage closely with other members of the data and analytics community at Hiscox to deliver value through various analytics techniques, sharing advanced knowledge and driving the adoption of robust analytical capabilities.

· Design, implement and maintain robust technical frameworks for monitoring, evaluating and quantifying the commercial impact and efficiency of data science solutions, ensuring continuous value demonstration.

Person Specification:

To excel as a Principal Data Scientist, you will typically possess:

· Bachelor's/Master's degree in a quantitative field (e.g., Computer Science, Statistics, Mathematics, Physics, Engineering) or equivalent.

· Extensive professional experience in data science, with a proven track record of technically leading and successfully delivering complex, impactful, and production-grade data science solutions.

· A background in data science within finance or insurance is advantageous but not required.

· Demonstrated capacity for independent, high-quality research and exploratory data analysis, with the ability to develop and apply novel methodologies to solve ill-defined and challenging business problems.

· Proven ability to design, implement, and maintain robust technical frameworks for evaluating commercial impact.

· Proven ability to technically mentor data scientists, fostering best practices, elevating technical standards, and contributing to the overall technical growth of the team.

· Strong understanding and practical experience with Agile development methodologies and software engineering best practices (e.g., version control, comprehensive testing, modular code) relevant to data science product delivery.

· Ability to articulate complex technical findings and methodologies into clear, concise, and actionable insights for diverse audiences, effectively influencing technical and non-technical stakeholders to drive data-driven decision-making and solution adoption.

· Demonstrable experience collaborating effectively with cross-functional teams (e.g., engineering, product, business stakeholders) to translate business challenges into robust technical requirements and ensure seamless delivery.

Key Technical Skills:

· Exceptional proficiency in Python (and R) for data science, coupled with SQL capabilities for data manipulation and extraction.

· Demonstrable mastery in a wide range of machine learning and statistical modelling techniques, from classical linear models and tree-based methods to advanced deep learning architectures.

· Practical experience with, or demonstrable capability for, applications of Generative AI, Large Language Models (LLMs), and related areas such as Natural Language Processing (NLP) or Computer Vision, relevant to business solutions.

· Solid understanding of foundational statistics and experimental design.

· Familiarity with or experience on cloud platforms

Impact and Achievements:

As a Principal Data Scientist, your success will be measured by your ability to:

· Pioneer the development and robust deployment of highly impactful machine learning and AI-driven solutions, directly contributing to significant commercial value, quantifiable business growth, or efficiency gains across the organization.

· Translate complex data science insights into tangible, measurable improvements across critical business processes and key performance indicators, ensuring the real-world adoption and beneficial outcomes of our analytical work.

· Actively elevate the technical maturity and capabilities of the data science team by shaping and implementing industry-leading AI, data, and analytics techniques, methodologies, and engineering best practices.


Work with amazing people and be part of a unique culture


#J-18808-Ljbffr

Related Jobs

View all jobs

Principal Data Scientist

Principal Data Scientist

Principal Data Scientist - Gram Games (Basé à London)

Principal Data Scientist - Gram Games (Basé à London)

Principal Data Scientist - Gram Games

Principal Data Scientist (Basé à Birmingham)

National AI Awards 2025

Subscribe to Future Tech Insights for the latest jobs & insights, direct to your inbox.

By subscribing, you agree to our privacy policy and terms of service.

Industry Insights

Discover insightful articles, industry insights, expert tips, and curated resources.

How to Present Data Science Solutions to Non-Technical Audiences: A Public Speaking Guide for Job Seekers

The ability to communicate clearly is now just as important as knowing how to build a predictive model or fine-tune a neural network. In fact, many UK data science job interviews are now designed to test your ability to explain your work to non-technical audiences—not just your technical competence. Whether you’re applying for your first data science role or moving into a lead or consultancy position, this guide will show you how to structure your presentation, simplify technical content, design effective visuals, and confidently answer stakeholder questions.

Data Science Jobs UK 2025: 50 Companies Hiring Now

Bookmark this guide—refreshed every quarter—so you always know who’s really expanding their data‑science teams. Budgets for predictive analytics, GenAI pilots & real‑time decision engines keep climbing in 2025. The UK’s National AI Strategy, tax relief for R&D & a sharp rise in cloud adoption mean employers need applied scientists, ML engineers, experiment designers, causal‑inference specialists & analytics leaders—right now. Below you’ll find 50 organisations that have advertised UK‑based data‑science vacancies or announced head‑count growth during the past eight weeks. They’re grouped into five quick‑scan categories so you can jump straight to the kind of employer—& culture—that suits you. For every company you’ll see: Main UK hub Example live or recent vacancy Why it’s worth a look (tech stack, mission, culture) Search any employer on DataScience‑Jobs.co.uk to view current ads, or set up a free alert so fresh openings land straight in your inbox.

Return-to-Work Pathways: Relaunch Your Data Science Career with Returnships, Flexible & Hybrid Roles

Returning to work after an extended break can feel like stepping into a whole new world—especially in a dynamic field like data science. Whether you paused your career for parenting, caring responsibilities or another life chapter, the UK’s data science sector now offers a variety of return-to-work pathways. From structured returnships to flexible and hybrid roles, these programmes recognise the transferable skills and resilience you’ve gained and provide mentorship, upskilling and supportive networks to ease your transition back. In this guide, you’ll discover how to: Understand the current demand for data science talent in the UK Leverage your organisational, communication and analytical skills in data science roles Overcome common re-entry challenges with practical solutions Refresh your technical knowledge through targeted learning Access returnship and re-entry programmes tailored to data science Find roles that fit around family commitments—whether flexible, hybrid or full-time Balance your career relaunch with caring responsibilities Master applications, interviews and networking specific to data science Learn from inspiring returner success stories Get answers to common questions in our FAQ section Whether you aim to return as a data analyst, machine learning engineer, data visualisation specialist or data science manager, this article will map out the steps and resources you need to reignite your data science career.