Job Title: Data Science Manager (Valuations & Pricing)

Salary: Competitive + Car Allowance + Bonus + Benefits!

Location: Hybrid working, home & 1-2 days a week in either BCA Hook or BCA King's Cross

Working Hours: Monday - Friday, 40 hours

Job Status: Permanent

Who we are!

The Constellation Automotive Group is the largest vertically integrated digital car marketplace in Europe, combining the leading digital brands across the segments of Consumer to Business (C2B), Business to Business (B2B) and Business to Consumer (B2C). Businesses in our group include house-hold names such as cinch, We Buy Any Car, and Marshall Motor Group as well as industry leading British Car Auctions (BCA).

Our Data Science function - now in its tenth year - sits across the Constellation Automotive Group and is at the forefront of providing data products and services that help underpin the success of these companies. Our cross-group remit is broad with our models ranging from valuation and commercial pricing to marketing and personalisation, through to operational optimisation including stock selection, delivery route optimisation and vehicle refurbishment.

Now, this is where you fit in…

As Data Science Manager for our Valuations and Pricing team, you’ll be responsible for leading the team responsible for our flagship valuation models and commercially aligned pricing models used across the group and industry to value vehicles, provide part-exchange pricing and ultimately maximising profitability within each division.

You’ll leverage our best-in-class framework to push continuous innovation in these products, working with our Head of Data Science to set the strategy for the Valuations and Pricing team.

The ideal candidate will be highly motivated by the opportunity to develop their team through coaching and mentoring, while also being willing to be hands-on, working with our Senior Staff Engineer to provide technical leadership to the team.

You’ll have great technical understanding of various machine learning approaches, which would include regression methods, probabilistic pricing models, tree based gradient boosting approaches, information theory, neural networks, transfer learning, etc.

While your focus will be primarily on the Valuations and Pricing Team you’ll also work alongside your peers in the Marketing & Personalisation team and Operations team to contribute through-leadership. As such, experience with Marketing Data Science (think Marketing Mix Modelling, Multi-touch attribution) or Operational Research is also welcome.

In return you’ll receive coaching and mentoring to grow as a people manager. Opportunity to have a clear and tangible impact across a group of businesses with senior stakeholder engagement. And you’ll be supported by our experienced MLOps and Data Engineering teams, allowing you more time to focus on model development, research and the implementation of new novel machine learning approaches.

Key Responsibilities:

• Lead the Valuations & Pricing Team ensuring the on-going improvements in KPIs associated with the team’s products
• Manage, coach and mentor a team of data scientists. Ensuring they achieve their growth goals and deliver anticipated business outcomes.
• Envision and support the team in implementing new ML solutions to address and prescribe for identified business priorities.
• Engage and build strong relationships with stakeholders across the group to identify new opportunities, communicate progress with innovations and promote the use of Valuation and Pricing products.
• Own the roadmap for the Valuations and Pricing team agreeing priorities with stakeholders and the Head of Data Science and enable the team to deliver against agreed targets.
• Work closely with the Machine Learning Operations team to deliver products to end users, leveraging and contributing to established engineering standards and best practices.
• Work collaboratively with the Insight & Analytics and Data Engineering teams to integrate model outputs into our data platform, ensuring their effective use in analysis and reporting
• Identify and drive improvements in our product lifecycle and machine learning pipelines, enhancing efficiency and enabling the team to innovate rapidly.
• Utilisation of models to develop and disseminate market intelligence in a clear and concise manner to BCA’s Senior Leadership.
• Explain the implications of models and model insights to business stakeholders and external customers in an easy-to-understand way.

Knowledge and Experience:

Required Skills:

• Experience engineering machine learning products to a high standard using Python.
• Excellent team management skills to lead, motivate and grow a diverse team who are geographically dispersed.
• Comfortable using a multi-platform stack to deliver products (Databricks, Azure ML Studio, Azure and Snowflake, SageMaker, AWS).
• Ability to take ownership of a broad data product-set and drive forward the delivery of new products and product features.
• Strong ability to communicate complex concepts clearly and concisely to technical and non-technical audiences of various levels of seniority.
• Proven ability to manage stakeholders.
• Broad expertise in machine learning methodologies, including predictive modelling, pattern recognition, and optimization techniques. Experience with reinforcement learning or transfer learning is a plus
• Excellent ability to gather, develop, prioritise and deliver customer requirements.
• Experience with continuous integration tools, such as Azure DevOps Pipelines or GitHub Actions, for automating reporting and model deployment.
• Strong attention to detail, well organised and proactive in identifying and owning issues as they arise.
• Experience of working in an Agile framework is a plus.
• Experience in Marketing Data Science or Operational Research is also desirable.

We’ve put everything in place to ensure you thrive. Competitive salaries, strong core values and an excellent benefits package that includes:

• Company Pension Scheme
• An Employee Assistance Programme
• Enhanced maternity, paternity, and adoption leave
• Access to trained Mental Health First Aiders

And so much more…

As the automotive industry changes, we’re changing with it - putting our people in the front seat for the journey. We’re the number one in what we do for a reason and that’s because of the people we have on our teams. If you want to be a part of a business like this; unrivalled, exciting and appreciative of the work you do, join BCA.