Senior Data Scientist @ England

Part of what makes this sort of analysis interesting is the contrast between this role with the role I looked at in Australia recently. And this England role should also be read in the context of a LinkedIn piece I wrote before I started Between the Lines.

Relative to the Australia one, the first thing that strikes you is how much more coherent this is as a description of what the role will involve and what the underlying structure will actually look like.

This is styled as a Senior Data Science role. There are broad conventions for what "senior" means in this context though it varies from organisation to organisation. Generally it's less about years of service and more about ownership: someone who can be handed an ambiguous problem and manage it end to end, whose technical judgement the rest of the team relies on and who exerts influence on the people around them.

You get a very clear description of what you'll be working on day to day, including the openly stated use of AI coding agents to accelerate the speed of development. I like that framing a lot. Reading the technical terms they use, I take it to mean optimising speed of development without compromising on quality.

There's also a very clear description of the technical skills required and the landscape you'd be working in, including references to Bayesian inference and MCMC, and all of that gives you a sense of the technical level of the team behind England (relative to other international teams in my experience).

Then there are two other things I really like. There's a clear articulation of where you sit and how you're supported, within an Insights department, a Data Architect helping you and an R&D team you'd be there to support. And there's a clear picture of what success looks like: actionable insights embedded into decision-making, findings validated to a high bar, and models that directly shape football decisions across the organisation.

So all in all this is a really well constructed job advert. And for more detail on England, I'd point you back to what I said in my earlier piece where I spoke directly to people at England.

It's based at St George's Park, expectation to be on site part of the week. Closing date is the 20th of September.