About the role
ICF supports governments and organisations on challenges in areas such as energy, the environment, aviation, health and public policy. Our data science team works with subject matter experts to turn evidence and data into practical solutions for clients in the UK and EU. You will help deliver data science and AI solutions across client projects, working with subject matter experts to frame questions, analyse evidence and deliver findings. This is a hands-on technical and consulting role: you will discuss needs with specialists, present approaches and results to varied audiences, and contribute to proposals. You will join an established team and work across technically diverse projects.
Responsibilities
•Speak with subject matter experts and clients to define the problem, success measures, data needs and an appropriate analytical approach.
•Prepare and analyse data, develop and evaluate models or prototypes using statistical methods, forecasting, machine learning or language models where suitable.
•Present findings, assumptions and limitations to subject matter experts, clients and nontechnical audiences, invite challenge and adapt the work to their feedback.
•Collaborate with colleagues across different technical disciplines to document work, make results reproducible and develop promising prototypes into reliable solutions.
•Contribute technical ideas, estimates and evidence to proposals, and manage your work across several concurrent projects.
•Share methods and reusable approaches with colleagues across the data science team.
Requirements
•Hands-on experience in Python for analysis and modelling, including common data and machine learning libraries, ability to use SQL to extract, join and check data.
•Sound grounding in statistics and machine learning, including regression or classification, forecasting, validation, baseline comparisons and appropriate performance measures.
•Practical familiarity with using large language models in analysis or prototyping, including prompting, checking outputs against evidence and recognising privacy, accuracy and reliability risks.
•Experience preparing imperfect data, building reproducible analyses and writing maintainable code with version control and testing.
•Ability to take an ambiguous question from discovery to a working demonstration, explain assumptions and uncertainty, and judge whether a solution is worth developing for operational use.
•Confidence working independently and engaging stakeholders across teams, clear written and spoken English for technical and nontechnical audiences.
•A relevant degree or equivalent practical experience in a quantitative field.
•Experience working in public policy, government, research or evaluation.
•Experience in consulting, public policy research or client-facing delivery, familiarity with cloud platforms, APIs, data pipelines or deployment.
•Experience building AI agents or applications that connect language models to data and tools, such as retrieval-based systems.
•ICF can train someone with strong core skills.
Conditions
•You will work alongside colleagues with a wide range of technical and subject expertise, tackling varied client challenges from discovery to delivery.
•Career development supported with ongoing training and opportunities to deepen both technical and consulting skills.
•Applications welcomed from candidates based anywhere in the world; for roles located in the UK, Belgium, Spain or Germany, applicants must hold the right to work in the country where the role is based, or be eligible for visa sponsorship (considered case-by-case), and be physically present in that country by their first day of employment (or able to relocate beforehand). Relocation support is not automatically provided unless stated otherwise.
•Hybrid working policy, allowing flexibility to work from the office and from home.
•Employee wellbeing hub offering personalised support across mind, body, finances, community, career programs and HR support.
•'You Matter' recognition program awarding points redeemable for vouchers and items, tax-free.
•Single Private Medical Insurance with no restrictions on existing conditions.
•Dental insurance and an online GP service.
•25 days annual leave, plus UK bank holidays (annual leave increases with years of service).
•Pension scheme with 5% of salary employer contribution.
•Life assurance paying 4x annual salary and Group Income Protection paying 66% of salary for up to 5 years if off work on long-term sick leave.
•Enhanced parental leave policies, including enhanced maternity, paternity, adoption and shared parental pay.
•Use of AI tools to generate or assist with responses during interviews is not permitted, except where needed as a disability accommodation (contact [email protected] in advance).
Location: London (GB80)
