Senior Innovation and Research Scientist (Machine Learning)

Senior Innovation & Research Scientist (Machine Learning)

About us:

Ordnance Survey Limited (OS) is the national mapping agency for Great Britain, and a world-leading geospatial data and technology organisation. As a reliable partner to government, business and citizens across Britain and the world, OS helps its customers in nearly all sectors improve quality of life. OS expertise and data supports efficient public services and infrastructure, new technologies in transport and communications, national security and emergency services, and exploring the great outdoors.

Imagine working for an organisation that is making a real difference to lives, communities and businesses everywhere. Ordnance Survey is doing some amazing things, from playing an active role in simulation and modelling systems for the next generation of connected and autonomous vehicles, developing nationally critical data hosting platforms, to creating new international mapping offers based on machine learning.

About the role

Ordnance Survey has a proud history of investing in research and innovation that develops novel approaches to extracting information from imagery. We are looking for someone who will provide leadership and expertise in developing a technical program in the machine learning image analysis space.

You will use, and develop upon, recent advances in analysis, computer vision and machine learning (especially deep learning) to radically change the way we operate, enabling new products and services for both our GB and international customers. Ordnance Survey has been working in the field of deep learning for many years and has created new capability in the field that extracts new insights through a combination of inference and discovery from imagery.  You will be responsible for transitioning knowledge from external research into OS and developing, testing, prototyping and evaluating methods and algorithms, before moving them to an engineering team who will robustly scale them into operation.

You will be in the Innovation team within Ordnance Surveys Proposition and Innovation (P&I) Group - a new function within OS which consists of over 100 professionals, delivering a world leading research, innovation, propositions, data and product management capability.

We are particularly interested in applicants with a creative approach to problem solving.  We encourage personal development and growth within the team using both formal and informal learning approaches. 

Responsibilities

With a focus on machine learning (especially deep learning), conceive, design, and implement scalable image analysis solutions employing the best algorithms and open-source libraries, both to meet specific data requirements and to discover new insights.

Create, run and document experiments and communicate results and ideas to key stakeholders.

Develop research code in Python and other languages (such as Scala, JavaScript and R).

Prepare data for further analysis, using data cleansing and data fusion techniques.

Focus the team and make decisions on the direction of the work through understanding the advantages and limitations of certain approaches.

Transition learning from our Research team and then guide an engineering development team to ensure systems can be deployed to create a robust and scalable capability based on your outputs.

Identify and develop new opportunities to exploit and extract value from imagery data to solve real-world problems for customers, both in GB and internationally.

Provide thought leadership & drive best practice.

Lead and provide mentorship to a team of 2 to 5 people.

Keep current with new technologies and research developments

You will ideally hold a degree qualification in computer science, software engineering, data science, mathematics, physics or a similar analytical subject. Alternatively, you will have significant experience of working in a relevant field within a research or production environment.

To be the successful person you will need to be able to demonstrate the following:

In-depth familiarity with machine learning approaches to image analysis, especially deep learning, using both supervised and unsupervised approaches.

Knowledge of other approaches to image analysis (e.g. in one or more of the fields of computer vision; object-based image analysis; other image classification and segmentation techniques, such as conditional random fields) when applied to imagery datasets at a variety of scales, from satellite imagery to close-range terrestrial imagery.

A track record of leading research / innovation projects and a drive for scientific innovation.

Consultancy skills, with a strong emphasis on customer focus, including an ability to determine and meet customer requirements.

An ability to manipulate, combine and present data, using a range of tools (either off the shelf or self-coded).

Proficiency in Python and knowledge of any or all of the following frameworks: Tensorflow, Keras, PyTorch, Spark, AzureML, DataBricks.

Excellent communication and presentation skills across a wide range of audiences.

Knowledge of cloud-based data science and open-source tools.

Knowledge of DevOps practises, continuous integration principles and version control.

Ability to work and collaborate with an interdisciplinary team of developers, research scientists, data scientists, data engineers and subject matter experts from OS and partner organisations.

Team management and technical leadership skills.

Ideally you will have knowledge and experience of:

Database skills

Experience of developing Machine Learning tools and deploying them in industrial flowlines

Other programming languages, such as R, Octave, SQL, Scala, JavaScript or Java

Cloud computing / Azure / Github experience

Familiarity with data visualization tools relevant for image analysis and geospatial data

About the Rewards

We want you to love what you do. Thats why our benefits package rewards a job well done. Well give you:

Salary £45,951-£51,357 per annum

Performance related bonus

Competitive pension

37 hour working week

25 days annual leave - (30 days after five years) bank holidays and an extra 3 over Christmas

Paid volunteer day

Bike to Work scheme (with secure bike storage and excellent changing facilities)

Free onsite parking

On-site nursery

Very generous staff benefits including over 500 discounts from national stores 

Wide variety of sports and social clubs

Support for your health and wellbeing from eye care vouchers to health checks

Flexible working hours 

Were always happy to hear from you, so dont forget to follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn or find us on Facebook.

Location: This role will nominally be based at our Headquarters in Southampton, but in the current circumstances, our employees are able to work from home.

To apply: Please upload your covering letter and CV demonstrating your suitability for the role.