Lead Data Scientist

We are seeking a Lead Data Scientist to define and deliver data and AI-enabled products and capabilities across legal, knowledge, finance, and business services. This is a senior, hands-on leadership role for someone who can set direction, translate high-value problems into scalable solutions, design robust data and GenAI architectures, and drive delivery into production with clear governance and measurable outcomes.

You will operate at the intersection of solution architecture, applied ML/GenAI, product delivery, and senior stakeholder management. You will lead use cases such as document intelligence, knowledge retrieval and search, due diligence, pricing/profitability insights, workflow automation, and agent-enabled assistants, while establishing the evaluation, monitoring, Responsible AI controls, and adoption metrics needed to scale impact across the firm.

Main duties and responsibilities

• Set the technical strategy and solution direction for the firm’s Data & AI portfolio across legal and business functions.
• Co-create the AI roadmap with senior stakeholders, prioritising opportunities by business value, feasibility, risk, and platform readiness.
• Turn ambiguous problem statements into target architectures, delivery plans, and clear technical requirements.
• Lead the design and implementation of ML, NLP, GenAI, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) solutions.
• Own the solution architecture patterns for orchestration, retrieval, evaluation, monitoring, security, and human-in-the-loop review.
• Deliver document-heavy AI use cases (e.g., OCR/document intelligence, clause extraction, due diligence, knowledge search, workflow automation).
• Partner with product and platform engineering, knowledge, legal tech, and business teams to integrate AI into core systems and workflows.
• Assess third-party vendors/tools and advise on capability fit, integration effort, governance, commercial model, and strategic longevity.
• Define standards for experimentation, validation, model quality, and release readiness (evaluation, testing, and monitoring).
• Coach and mentor data scientists, analysts, and cross-functional contributors; uplift delivery maturity and engineering standards.

About you

• Significant experience leading Data, ML, and GenAI initiatives in complex enterprise and/or regulated environments.
• Proven ability to blend strategy, stakeholder leadership, and hands-on technical delivery to achieve measurable outcomes.
• Strong working knowledge of Python and SQL, ML workflows, and modern GenAI tooling.
• Experience building statistical and measurement frameworks (e.g., adoption/usage, quality, value tracking, experimentation design).
• Strong experience with LLM applications, RAG, embeddings, vector search, and custom retrieval patterns.
• Experience designing and delivering solutions on Azure and Databricks (including Azure OpenAI and Azure AI Foundry or equivalent capabilities).
• Experience with document-heavy AI use cases (OCR/document intelligence, search, summarisation, extraction, and classification).
• Strong stakeholder management skills, with the ability to influence senior leaders and align IT and business teams.
• Track record of defining governance, evaluation, security, and Responsible AI controls for deployed solutions.
• Ability to lead multi-disciplinary delivery teams and mentor technical practitioners while remaining credible at architecture depth.

About us

We're a global law firm helping our clients achieve their goals wherever they do business. Our pursuit of innovation has transformed our delivery of legal services. With offices in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia Pacific, we deliver exceptional outcomes on cross-border projects, critical transactions and high-stakes disputes.

Where local legislation permits, we will conduct relevant pre-engagement screening checks prior to your first day.

Agile Working

We recognise that people have responsibilities and interests outside of their career and that as a business, we all benefit from working flexibly. That’s why we are open to discussing with candidates the different ways in which we are able to support requests for agile working arrangements.

Pre-Engagement Screening

In the event that we make an offer to you, and where local legislation permits, we will conduct pre-engagement screening checks that may include but are not limited to your professional and academic qualifications, your eligibility to work in the relevant jurisdiction, any criminal records, your financial stability, and references from previous employers.