Head of Data Science

ABOUT THE ROLE

This role is ideal for someone as an entry role into the football industry from another field.

The club is in the process of developing elements of the recruitment department which will aid with first-team goals and objectives in the medium to long-term, helping to make sensible and strategic decisions across these time horizons. The role will ensure appropriate analysis takes place on all first-team player acquisitions, and considerations on a wealth of relevant information are made. The role will be to support the Head of Recruitment in the first instance and undertake research and project-based work within the post on an ad-hoc, directed, and autonomous basis, with the building of machine learning models being an important first step.

The role will demand high-level technical skills across statistics, programming and data analysis, as well as a hunger and interest in problem-solving within the context of a football recruitment department.

Key Responsibilities

• Construct, design and apply statistical and machine learning models, trained on football data, at a biographical and event level.
• Firmly enshrine data-science workflows and solutions in the recruitment department’s due diligence and team building.
• Analyse and visualise complex data around recruitment projects, providing regression analysis where required, and attempt to optimise club decision-making around all aspects of team building and recruitment in an accessible way.
• Support the storage and extraction of data from multiple sources and data providers, including APIs, and combine and display this data in a digestible way for the benefit of staff.
• Create novel metrics with event data which answer performance-related questions within a recruitment context.
• Clean and integrate databases in order to build workflows within recruitment analysis.
• Undertaking novel research from new and untested datasets to find value and market arbitrage with player trading.
• Writing bespoke code on request to support and enhance recruitment.
• Assist the recruitment department with ad-hoc requests when required.
• Suggest data science solutions to current Lincoln City recruitment analysis workflows.
• Create automated reports, both regular and ad-hoc.

ABOUT THE CANDIDATE

Knowledge

The level and breadth of knowledge to do the job, eg. understanding of a defined system, method or procedure, legal or regulatory frameworks etc

Essential

• Experience in statistical modelling techniques and data management. Experience building models with machine learning (sciki-learn, statsmodel, or dplyr).
• Experience with data visualization (matplotlib, ggplot or plotly) and reporting in Python or R.

Desirable

• Proficiency in database tools/queries such as MySQL and experience with infrastructure management in AWS or Azure clouds.
• Knowledge of football datasets: Physical data, match data at team or player level, event data and tracking data.

Technical/Work-Based Skills

Skills specific to the job, eg. computer competency, typing skills, coaching skills etc.

Essential

• High level of proficiency in Python or R.
• Experience of managing and interrogating large datasets and performing appropriate analysis.

Desirable

• Automatization tools (Bash scripting, Airflow or others).
• Knowledge of database design, star schema, data lakes, views and fact-modeling.
• Previous experience in a non-technical team with data analysts or domain stakeholders.

General Skills and Atributes

More general characteristics, eg. flexibility, communication skills, team working etc

Essential

• Ability to manage multiple tasks simultaneously.
• Strong attention to detail.
• Positive attitude towards challenging tasks.
• Able to solve problems independently.
• Team player and ability to meet deadlines under pressure.
• Learning mentality, looking to constantly improve and pick up new skills/attributes.
• Promote, adhere to and implement the Club’s Equality Policy and to work consistently to embed equality and diversity within Club.

Experience

Proven record of experience in a particular field, profession or specialism

Essential

• Web-scraping.
• Data serving components (internal API development). Experience using APIs returning formatted data. External API management.

Desirable

• Experience in working at a high professional level within the field of data science.
• Experience establishing and managing relational databases.
• Experience with Tableau/PowerBI.