Principal Data Scientist

We’re looking for a skilled professional to join our Analytics and AI team.  You’ll work closely with stakeholders to identify and prioritise AI opportunities, ensuring outputs are explainable, responsible, and embedded effectively within the organisation.

Collaboration is key—you’ll partner with data analysts, engineers, and product owners to create solutions that meet business needs, while contributing to frameworks that uphold ethics, transparency, and performance. Additionally, you’ll support the ICO Data Academy to boost data literacy and stay ahead of emerging trends in AI and analytics to drive innovation and value.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) is the independent regulator of information rights. In a data-driven world, we provide advice, guidance, and support to organisations enabling compliance with their obligations, as well as protecting individuals and their personal data. 

As an employer, we are passionate about making a positive difference to the lives and careers of our people, and we empower you to be curious, impactful, collaborative and respectful. 

Job description

• The role will form part of our analytics and AI function, providing technical expertise in the disciplines of analytics and AI. The role will help unlock insight from our wealth of internal data and advise and deliver on the best methodologies for the problem at hand.
• The role will primarily involve engaging with internal stakeholders to deliver analytics and AI solutions that provide value and benefit to the organisation while ensuring outputs are high quality, accurate, and consider data privacy and data ethics by design.  Outputs might include reports and dashboards, data and statistical analyses, or products that utilise artificial intelligence technologies. 
• The role will also work with the Head of AI and Analytics to deliver wider objectives belonging to our Enterprise Data Strategy (EDS). This includes contributing to our new data literacy initiative, the ICO Data Academy, to empower ICO’s people to better use and analyse data.

Key responsibilities:

• To build, develop, and test AI and analytics products that align with ICO’s business strategies and provide value in a timely, accurate and ethical manner, ensuring outputs are explainable, responsible, and embedded effectively within the organisation.
• To identify, define and prioritise new AI opportunities that might offer value to the organisation.  You will be able to work closely with business stakeholders to understand their priorities and challenges, bringing this together with your technical understanding of AI / analytics approaches, to determine practical solutions
• Feed into the mechanisms / frameworks that provide assurances that AI solutions are built responsibly, and considerations such as explainability, ethics, and model performance are thoroughly considered and monitored
• Work closely with product delivery mechanisms to retain critical stakeholder engagement throughout the development of solutions, and successful embedment at the time of implementation.
• Work closely with the Senior Data Analysts, Senior Data Engineers and Data Product Owners to ensure AI and analytics solutions are designed collaboratively, meet business needs, and are embedded effectively into operational workflows
• Play an active role in our new data literacy initiative – the ICO Data Academy - helping to support the empowerment of data skills and awareness for our colleagues, and supporting the broader data analytics community that exists within the ICO
• Remain continuously informed of new developments in the fields of data analytics and AI, so to be able to assess whether emerging techniques and innovation might be applied within the organisation for to drive new impact and value

Person specification 

Essential criteria assessed at application stage:

• Substantial experience relevant to the role requirements, as described in the role responsibilities and person specification, and accumulated through any combination of academic or vocational qualifications or experience.
• Delivering AI solutions as part of a data science team, utilising open source coding languages, such as Python, and building Machine Learning models/Large Language Models
• Working in cloud environments, such as Microsoft Azure, and utilising cloud services.
• Delivering AI solutions within an ethics and governance framework 
• Supporting data science capability building across a team and wider organisation

Essential criteria assessed during interview:

• An understanding of how analytics and AI can be used to drive value within an organisation.
• Technical understanding across a wide range of data analysis, data science and AI techniques including, but not limited to, exploratory data analysis, statistics, machine learning, operational research, data visualisation, NLP, and generative AI. 
• Proficient in Python coding language, experience of working within cloud platforms, such as Microsoft Azure, and knowledge of git version control.
• Approaches for measuring and monitoring quality metrics when introducing analytics and AI solutions and products
• Frameworks/approaches to support responsible AI innovation, including identification and prioritisation of new opportunities
• Ability to proactively engage with stakeholders to understand business challenges, and be able to provide solutions
• Actively keeping informed of industry developments to ensure the relevance of new and emerging approaches and technologies.
• Knowledge of the data protection and privacy landscape, regulations, and obligations for data practitioners. 
• Ability to deal with complexity and ambiguity, creative problem solving and developing innovative solutions. 
• Makes complex and technical information and language simple and accessible for non-technical audiences.  

Equality, diversity, and inclusion 

The ICO is committed to promoting and enhancing equality, diversity, and inclusion. We are focused on developing a workforce that is representative of the communities we serve and together we are building an inclusive workplace where all of our colleagues have the opportunity to make a real difference. We are championing this through our Equality Diversity and Inclusion Board together with a number of staff networks. Read more about our commitment on our website.  

Candidates with a disability who meet the minimum criteria for this vacancy will be invited to interview as part of the ICO’s commitment to the Disability Confident Scheme. 

As part of the ICO’s commitment to our EDI objectives and creating a workplace that represents the communities and societies we serve, we guarantee an interview to candidates who declare they identify as belonging from an ethnic minority background and who meet the minimum criteria for this vacancy

If you are disabled or have an impairment and require an alternative application method, please email the HR team at recruitment@ico.org.uk  

Closing Date 

Please submit your CV and cover letter by 23:59, Sunday 11^th January 2026 . Your cover letter should be no more than 1,000 words and should clearly demonstrate how you meet the essential criteria for the role.

We may close this vacancy early if we receive a high volume of applications. To ensure your application is considered, we encourage you to apply as soon as possible. If you require any reasonable adjustments to support your application, please contact us at recruitment@ico.org.uk.

In the event of a high volume of applications, we may not be able to invite all candidates who meet the minimum criteria to interview. However, we encourage you stay in touch and apply for future roles that match your interests. 

All candidates who meet the minimum criteria and apply in-line with our guaranteed interview scheme for disabled and ethnic minority applicants will be interviewed.