Lead Data Scientist

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We are seeking a Lead Data Scientist to define and deliver data and AI-enabled products and capabilities across legal, knowledge, finance, and business services. This is a senior, hands-on leadership role for someone who can set direction, translate high-value problems into scalable solutions, design robust data and GenAI architectures, and drive delivery into production with clear governance and measurable outcomes.

You will operate at the intersection of solution architecture, applied ML/GenAI, product delivery, and senior stakeholder management. You will lead use cases such as document intelligence, knowledge retrieval and search, due diligence, pricing/profitability insights, workflow automation, and agent-enabled assistants, while establishing the evaluation, monitoring, Responsible AI controls, and adoption metrics needed to scale impact across the firm.

Main duties and responsibilities

• Set the technical strategy and solution direction for the firm’s Data & AI portfolio across legal and business functions.
• Co-create the AI roadmap with senior stakeholders, prioritising opportunities by business value, feasibility, risk, and platform readiness.
• Turn ambiguous problem statements into target architectures, delivery plans, and clear technical requirements.
• Lead the design and implementation of ML, NLP, GenAI, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) solutions.
• Own the solution architecture patterns for orchestration, retrieval, evaluation, monitoring, security, and human-in-the-loop review.
• Deliver document-heavy AI use cases (e.g., OCR/document intelligence, clause extraction, due diligence, knowledge search, workflow automation).
• Partner with product and platform engineering, knowledge, legal tech, and business teams to integrate AI into core systems and workflows.
• Assess third-party vendors/tools and advise on capability fit, integration effort, governance, commercial model, and strategic longevity.
• Define standards for experimentation, validation, model quality, and release readiness (evaluation, testing, and monitoring).
• Coach and mentor data scientists, analysts, and cross-functional contributors; uplift delivery maturity and engineering standards.

About you

• Significant experience leading Data, ML, and GenAI initiatives in complex enterprise and/or regulated environments.
• Proven ability to blend strategy, stakeholder leadership, and hands-on technical delivery to achieve measurable outcomes.
• Strong working knowledge of Python and SQL, ML workflows, and modern GenAI tooling.
• Experience building statistical and measurement frameworks (e.g., adoption/usage, quality, value tracking, experimentation design).
• Strong experience with LLM applications, RAG, embeddings, vector search, and custom retrieval patterns.
• Experience designing and delivering solutions on Azure and Databricks (including Azure OpenAI and Azure AI Foundry or equivalent capabilities).
• Experience with document-heavy AI use cases (OCR/document intelligence, search, summarisation, extraction, and classification).
• Strong stakeholder management skills, with the ability to influence senior leaders and align IT and business teams.
• Track record of defining governance, evaluation, security, and Responsible AI controls for deployed solutions.
• Ability to lead multi-disciplinary delivery teams and mentor technical practitioners while remaining credible at architecture depth.

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About us

We're a global law firm helping our clients achieve their goals wherever they do business. Our pursuit of innovation has transformed our delivery of legal services. With offices in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia Pacific, we deliver exceptional outcomes on cross-border projects, critical transactions and high-stakes disputes.

At DLA Piper, we understand that inclusion is not a one-size-fits-all concept. We embrace and celebrate the range of perspectives, backgrounds and experiences that each individual brings to our firm. By fostering a culture that welcomes and appreciates all aspects of our individuality, we ensure that everyone has the opportunity to succeed.

Our commitment to inclusion and positive social impact enables us to provide exceptional service to our clients and communities, while nurturing a unique and inclusive culture for all our people. We welcome the unique contribution that you will bring to our firm and actively encourage applications from all talented people – however your talent is packaged, whatever your background or circumstance and regardless of how you identify.

We are committed to being accessible and accommodating any reasonable adjustments needed throughout the recruitment process to ensure an inclusive experience for all. If you need any support or adjustments, please let us know.

Where local legislation permits, we will conduct relevant pre-engagement screening checks prior to your first day.