Senior Data Scientist

Description

Business Group Overview

Hitachi Europe Digital Solutions Group (DSG) is an innovative business and technology venture operating as the UK extension of Hitachi Ltd‘s ‘Internet of Things’ and Information and Communications Solutions Divisions. As a global entrepreneurial team, we deliver social innovation projects in the UK with a focus on Cities, Connected Communities, Resource Management and Mobility powered by the latest technologies in IoT and AI.

The DSG is currently seeking Senior Data Scientists for our current ‘Optimise Prime’ programme in London.

About Optimise Prime

Ofgem, the UK’s Gas and Electricity Markets regulator, has agreed to award funding to the Optimise Prime project under its Network Innovation Competition (NIC). Hitachi, together with UK Power Networks, Royal Mail, Centrica, Uber and Scottish & Southern Electricity Networks, has formed the Optimise Prime consortium to study the impact of commercial EVs on the UK grid.

Optimise Prime is a 4 years project (2019-22) which will collect data from 3 trial fleets (Royal Mail, Centrica and Uber) and develop charging solutions for depot and home based commercial electric vehicles. The principle goal of the Optimise Prime programme is to develop the world’s largest dataset on commercial electric vehicle charging, improve the ability of Distribution Network Operators (DNOs) to accurately forecast changing demand and provide cost effective electrification options for fleets.

Hitachi and will lead the project and will deliver a number of technology solutions, including the depot energy management tools and the project’s central IoT platform which will perform the network demand forecasting and analysis necessary to reduce the cost of fleet electrification. More information can be found at: https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/system/files/docs/2018/11/op_fsp_final_public_v1-clean.pdf

Role Overview

DSG is seeking Senior Data Scientists to support the design, build and testing of models to analyse data to perform the trials.

You will be an advocate for renewable energy, electric vehicles and their charging infrastructure, technology and social innovation with an exceptional eye for detail.

In this role, you will be responsible for supporting your leading the Data Science work and managing junior data scientists to ensure the quality of the EV trials that are delivered with Royal Mail, Centrica and Uber. As such, you are required to be an excellent communicator and problem solver. You will be involved with a variety of hands on tasks and be comfortable working with senior and junior programme stakeholders from both within the Hitachi Group and its partners.

The candidate will have an excellent academic background.

Tasks:

• Reporting directly to the Trials Manager and Programme Lead for Optimise Prime in the Digital Solutions Group to ensure overall quality of the delivered trials and technology
• Liaising with the Business team to ensure insights are applicable and relevant to partners
• Liaising with the Engineering team to ensure quality of underlying data sets
• Ingest, analyse and draw conclusions from the EV data – often millions of rows of data
  • Curating relevant data visualisations to communicate insights and learnings
  • Building high quality data science and Machine Learning models, particularly for time series and unsupervised clustering applications
• Work closely with 3rd party development partners to ensure a high quality of delivery
• Write and maintain project documentation of technical models developed and insights learned, including overview of key graphs and supporting data tables.
• Lead and manage technical delivery of key models and graphs to support internal business and operations teams and to inform external stakeholders

Requirements

Essential:

• A highly numerate degree with 3+ years of professional experience in data science/Python development
• Extreme fluency in pandas, writing vectorised and performant code, ideally OOP and modularised functional code.
• Taking pride in a code base, with a bias towards software engineering principles – clear commented code, and documentation to support modelling and insights
• ML Library Experience (strong experience in sklearn as a minimum) and awareness of ML Principles (overfitting & underfitting, sampling methods etc)
• Experience in time series modelling (forecasting and prediction) and unsupervised clustering algorithms
• Experience with SQL databases: we use PostgreSQL to create relevant views of our data.
• Strong visualisation knowledge (matplotlib, seaborn, plotly) and ability to clearly summarise findings graphically and with supporting data tables.
• Proficiency in Git as a version control software
• Ability to deal with external and internal stakeholders to ensure data quality
• Familiarity of dealing with large datasets (often millions of rows in Python, up to hundreds of millions of rows in SQL)
• Strong, demonstrated interest in technical innovation and low carbon technology
• A love for exploring vast datasets and uncovering patterns, working to deliver against agreed objectives and hypotheses but a strong curiosity for independent analyses.
• Excellent English communication skills - ability to clearly and succinctly present ideas in writing

Preferred:

• An understanding of the Electric Vehicle (EV) landscape and/or electricity grid operations (ideally at DNO level)
• Understanding of the wider context of the UK and European energy markets and policy drivers will be a benefit
• Understanding of renewable generation technologies
• Knowledge of Spark, PySpark and MLLib.
• Experience with cloud computing frameworks
• Basic knowledge of Docker
• (Nice to have) Experience/awareness of REST APIs, particularly in Flask/FastAPI/Django (and Django REST Framework) as well as productionising code

Company Overview
Hitachi Europe Ltd (HEU) is a social innovation company with headquarters based in Maidenhead, England. The company’s European operations employ over 350 people to deliver services and solutions to customers in several key business areas. The company’s portfolio includes digital media products, industrial components and equipment, value chain integration, research and design, information systems.

HEU is also responsible for managing a Shared Services Group that provides the Company’s business units with a range of innovative and effective common services that deliver value, create ‘lean’ processes and support growth and development – including HR, IT, Legal, Finance, Public Affairs and Business Development.