Senior Data Scientist – Shiny & Pharma Specialist - Acuity Analytics

The Shiny lead who turns pharma analytics into actionable apps.

About Us

Ascent has recently been acquired by Acuity Analytics. This is both a significant milestone for us and a tremendous opportunity for you. Acuity Analytics is a business with a strong global reputation, an impressive client base and ambitious growth plans. We deliver deep insights and domain-led digital transformation to high-growth and heavily regulated organisations. To our customers, we bring a partnership that provides the talent, technology and capability to enhance performance and operational efficiency.

About the role

You will lead the design and delivery of Shiny-based analytics applications for pharma clients, acting as the technical lead on projects and coordinating across developers, data engineers and client stakeholders. You will apply SAGE methodology to structure analytics work, provide senior-level technical support for complex application issues when needed, and ensure outputs map to client needs and commercial value.

Skills and experience

Core Technical Skills

• Design, build and optimise Shiny applications that integrate with APIs and demonstrate end-to-end app performance considerations, including data modelling such as star schema.

• Produce high-quality, documented SQL and R code with unit tests and reproducible setup, including developing, testing and maintaining reusable R packages for production use, and use containerisation and environment tools such as Docker and Windows Subsystem for Linux to package and distribute solutions.

Interpersonal Traits

• Lead customer-facing technical discussions, present project progress and trade-offs to stakeholders, and explain technical risks clearly to non-technical audiences.

• Builds strong user relationships by listening carefully to feedback, clarifying needs and communicating progress and outcomes clearly.

• Mentor and review colleagues’ work by providing clear, actionable technical feedback and supporting onboarding to develop team capability.

• Engage in agile ceremonies and contribute to architectural discussions, driving adoption of good practices and pragmatic technical decisions across the team.

Pharma Experience

• Operate in the tech lead role on pharma engagements, coordinating delivery and making decisions that reflect pharma project constraints.

• Apply SAGE methodology to structure analytics workstreams and ensure outputs align with client expectations in pharma projects.

Nice to Have

• Core Data Science Skills such as; applying statistical rigour and machine learning methods, including designing A/B testing frameworks using frequentist and Bayesian approaches.

• Experience using established Shiny development frameworks, such as golem or Rhino, to build structured, maintainable and production-ready applications.

• Working knowledge of HTML, CSS and JavaScript, with the ability to use these technologies to create and enhance interactive visualisations and improve the user experience of Shiny applications.

• Experience using the data.table R package to efficiently manipulate, transform and analyse large or complex datasets.

What you will do

• Lead delivery of Shiny-based analytics projects for pharma accounts, coordinating cross-functional teams to meet defined success criteria and timelines.

• Support user testing by gathering customer feedback on applications, translating it into clear technical requirements, implementing fixes and communicating outcomes back to users.

• Advise clients on technical solution design and identify capability or capacity gaps that shape the account approach and opportunity discovery.

• Plan and estimate technical delivery work, supporting project management with realistic technical scope, dependencies and acceptance criteria.

• Own key deliverables end-to-end, including defining success metrics, performing quality control and presenting outputs that link analytics work to commercial impact.

• Contribute to internal assets, proofs-of-concept and accelerators to scale our Shiny and analytics offerings across accounts.

• Drive reductions in technical debt by proposing pragmatic trade-offs, prioritising fixes that restore service, and defining repayment plans to improve long-term stability.

Why join us

People are at the Heart of our Business. By investing in people, we achieve exceptional results for our clients and create new opportunities for our teams to thrive.

If you have any questions contact our Talent Acquisition team on ta.admin@acuityanalytics.

For more details about Acuity Analytics please see here: Read here.