Lead Applied Scientist - AI Search & Brand Intelligence

📋 Description

• ~45% hands-on research and modelling - you design and run experiments yourself
• ~45% technical and project leadership - hypothesis prioritisation, decomposition, methodology review
• ~10% people management - directing a small team's day-to-day (1-2 people)
• Setup a repeatable experiment pipeline: hypothesis → data scope → design → run → insight → decision
• Run the first 3-4 experiments and, with Product, define candidate features
• Design sampling methods to systematically collect and analyse AI responses

🎯 Requirements

• 5-6+ years in Data Science or Applied Science with a track record of taking ambiguous research
• Deep, hands-on expertise in ranking & information retrieval (learning to rank
• Strong, current GenAI/LLM expertise: using LLMs as an analysis tool - prompting and evaluating both
• Rigorous model evaluation and validation: leakage detection, temporal/out-of-time validation, and
• Comfortable directing a small team's day-to-day (1-2 people)
• Solid English (B2+) - able to explain a complex result to a marketer and a sceptical engineer

🎁 Benefits

• Direct, ticket-free access to SE Ranking's datasets - SERP, backlinks, content, audits, GA/GSC -
• Dedicated data/analytics engineering support
• A dedicated LLM API budget for systematic response sampling (OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Perplexity)
• An opportunity to publish: conference talks, research, and our own best practice
• Authority to launch experiments without asking for permission first