Senior Data Scientist

Location: London / Hybrid
Position: Full-time
Reports to: CTO
Posted: July, 2025

About the role

We are seeking a mission-driven Senior Data Scientist (Machine Learning) to help expand and accelerate the capabilities of our soil functional intelligence platform. You will play a central role in building machine learning models that transform diverse physicochemical, genomic and environmental data into actionable insights to enable sustainable agriculture.

The ideal candidate will bring a strong foundation in applied machine learning, including expertise using statistical, tree-based and neural approaches, combined with experience working on real-world datasets. A background in agritech, bioinformatics or environmental data is preferred but not required - intellectual curiosity and adaptability are the essentials!

You will be responsible for building scalable predictive agronomic models and contributing to new platform features such as model explainability, semantic representations and intelligent APIs.

Key Responsibilities

  • Build, validate, and deploy ML models including statistical regressors, ensemble models, and neural architectures on Elaniti’s proprietary agricultural database

  • Leverage foundational models and LLMs for knowledge extraction and interpretation of unstructured biological and agricultural data

  • Develop and manage semantic models and knowledge graphs that connect taxonomic, functional and agronomic data

  • Implement and automate evaluation pipelines to ensure model transparency and scientific rigour

  • Collaborate with biogeochemists, microbiologists, agronomists and software engineers to define hypotheses, transform data into model-ready formats, and translate findings into user-facing insights

  • Contribute to data architecture, model lifecycle management and research infrastructure, including ML experiment tracking and version control

About you

Education

Master’s or PhD in Data Science, Statistics, Bioinformatics, Physics or a related discipline.

Experience

  • 3+ years of hands-on industry or applied research experience in developing, validating and deploying machine learning models

  • Experience with multi-modal or sparse real-world datasets (e.g. tabular, text, geospatial, biogeochemical)

  • Prior work in an early-stage startup or research-led environment is a bonus

Technical Skills

  • Proficiency in Python, including libraries such as pandas, scikit-learn, XGBoost, PyTorch, TensorFlow etc.

  • Experience developing statistical models, tree-based ensembles and neural networks for regression and classification problems

  • Working knowledge of LLMs, embeddings, vector search and/or prompt engineering for real-world applications

  • Experience with knowledge graphs, ontology modeling or semantic networks

  • Familiarity with geospatial data, PostgreSQL/PostGIS and cloud environments

  • Working knowledge of ML ops best practices including versioning, testing, containerisation and CI/CD pipelines

  • Bonus: familiarity with bioinformatics tools or prior exposure to DNA/rRNA sequencing data

Soft Skills

  • A high degree of curiosity and adaptability to nascent problem spaces

  • Analytical and hypothesis-driven, with the ability to translate scientific and product goals into robust experiments

  • Communicative and collaborative with experience working across multi-disciplinary teams

  • Passionate about nature-based solutions (bonus - and the future of regenerative or sustainable agriculture)

We have an open mind in terms of the experience and background a successful candidate may bring. If you do not meet all the criteria on the list but still think you are a good fit, please reach out. If you are passionate about our work, and excited to learn, we would love to hear from you!

Benefits

  • Competitive salary

  • Share options in a fast growing company for this integral role

  • 30 days annual leave

  • Remote/flexible/hybrid working options available

  • Pension scheme

  • Personal development budget

Recruitment process

Send your CV to hello@elaniti.com and a brief note describing your interest. If you are selected to go further, the process will proceed as follows:

  • Initial video call with one of the team

  • Chat with CTO

  • Technical test

  • Chat with CEO

  • Offer

About Elaniti

We are Elaniti and we help farmers and agronomists unlock the power of their soil microbiome for healthier harvests. 

Soil is fundamental to life on Earth - our soils are responsible for 95% of the food we eat. But through conventional farming, our soils are becoming increasingly degraded. The transition to sustainable and regenerative agriculture has become urgent and inevitable, and must be expedited if we are to reach our Net Zero goals. 

Elaniti works within the agricultural sector to support yield, nutrient use efficiency and disease management objectives, leveraging advancements in DNA sequencing, bioinformatics and Machine Learning/AI to provide increasingly precise decision support to growers.