{"id":902004,"url":"https://alion.io/job/mindera-lead-data-scientist","title":"Lead Data Scientist","company":{"id":54054,"name":"Mindera","domain":"mindera.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/mindera","size_band":"201-500","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Workable","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":89,"open_postings":27,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.259,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":70,"computed_at":"2026-11-04T06:34:25Z"}},"role":"Data Science","role_family":"Data Science","seniority":"lead","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Cluj-Napoca, Romania","Bucharest, Romania","Iași, Romania","Timișoara, Romania","Brașov, Romania"],"countries":["RO"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":35000,"max_usd":80000,"period":"year","method":"global_role_cell_scaled_by_country","sample_n":771},"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Agile","optional":false},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"Databricks","optional":false},{"name":"Delta Lake","optional":false},{"name":"Embeddings","optional":false},{"name":"Git","optional":false},{"name":"MLFlow","optional":false},{"name":"pySpark","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Recommender Systems","optional":false},{"name":"Spark","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-14T00:00:00Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-14","last_verified_at":"2026-11-04T16:22:07Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":51,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":0,"flags":[],"days_open":51},"description":"At Mindera, we believe that software is built by people, for people, with high-performance systems that impact users worldwide. We are looking for a Lead Data Scientist to join an agile, collaborative team where your voice matters as much as your code.\nThis role is therefore not about inventing a new strategy from scratch. It is about taking an agreed plan, implementing it well, and owning the recommendation models end to end in production.\nWe value empathy, self-organization, and a positive attitude. If you are approachable, communicate clearly, and believe that team fit is just as important as technical expertise, you'll feel right at home here.\nAt Mindera we encourage the use of AI to assist with coding and related tasks. We find a persons skill in engineering and software craft, has a big impact long term successful delivery, with or without AI. Our goal in the interview process is to understand the candidates knowledge and skill with engineering.\nIf you need to, or plan to use AI, please be transparent with us when you're using it, to avoid issues and misunderstandings that can either: impact your chance of securing the role or impact your success at Mindera.\nNational and international expected traveling time varies according to project/client and organizational needs: 0%-15% estimated.\nHow You'll Contribute:\n You will work closely with the Data Science leadership, engineering teams, becoming the senior hands-on Data Scientist responsible for progressing the recommendation capability in a disciplined and maintainable way.\nLead the consolidation of existing recommendation algorithms into a simpler, more coherent recommendation capability.\nImplement the client’s existing technical direction and agreed delivery plan.\nReview current recommendation approaches and rationalise duplication, inconsistency and unnecessary complexity.\nDevelop, improve and productionise recommendation models across agreed customer and commercial use cases.\nOwn the full recommendation model lifecycle:\nData and feature development;\nModel development;\nEvaluation;\nProduction implementation;\nMonitoring;\nRetraining;\nOngoing optimisation.\nWork directly in Databricks, using Python and PySpark to develop scalable production workloads.\nRefactor exploratory or notebook-based Data Science code into maintainable production implementations.\nApply strong object-oriented design and software engineering principles to the recommendation codebase.\nCreate reusable and testable components for areas such as candidate generation, scoring, ranking, feature generation and evaluation.\nBuild appropriate automated testing around Data Science and ML code.\nWork with engineering and platform teams on production integration without handing off ownership of the models themselves.\nDefine and maintain clear offline evaluation frameworks.\nSupport online experimentation and measurement of recommendation effectiveness.\nMonitor production behaviour and take ownership of model quality once live.\nProvide clear technical communication to both client stakeholders and the wider delivery team.\nRequirements\nThis is a Data Science role with a much stronger production engineering expectation than a typical modelling-only position.\nWe are looking for someone with strong experience in:\nRecommendation systems, ranking or personalisation.\nPython in production Data Science environments.\nDatabricks.\nPySpark / Spark.\nLarge-scale customer, product or behavioural datasets.\nObject-oriented programming.\nClean code and software design principles.\nModular, reusable and testable ML code.\nUnit testing.\nGit-based development.\nCI/CD practices for Data Science or ML workloads.\nModel evaluation and experimentation.\nDeploying models into production.\nMonitoring and maintaining production models.\nRelevant recommendation experience could include:\nCollaborative filtering;\nContent-based recommendation;\nHybrid approaches;\nCandidate generation;\nRanking;\nLearning to rank;\nEmbeddings;\nRepresentation learning;\nPersonalisation;\nExperimentation and incremental impact measurement.\nExperience with MLflow, Delta Lake, Databricks Workflows and model lifecycle management would be highly valuable.\nThe strategic direction already exists.\nThe successful person needs to be comfortable coming into an established environment, understanding the current state quickly, and executing and improving the agreed approach.\nYou will likely be someone who has spent several years as a strong hands-on Data Scientist and has gradually taken on more responsibility for how your models are engineered, deployed and operated.\nYou should be equally comfortable:\nDiscussing recommendation methodology;\nReviewing model performance;\nWriting Python;\nRefactoring code;\nDesigning clean class structures;\nWorking in Databricks;\nDebugging PySpark;\nWriting tests;\nWorking through production issues;\nExplaining technical trade-offs to stakeholders.\nYou will need to be pragmatic.\nWe don't need someone who immediately wants to redesign everything. They need someone who can understand the existing plan, challenge it where necessary, and then drive it through to a high-quality implementation.\nYou will also be expected to:\nBuild credibility quickly with senior client Data Science stakeholders;\nOperate independently within the client team;\nCommunicate progress, risks and technical decisions clearly;\nWork collaboratively rather than positioning yourself as an external reviewer;\nBalance client delivery priorities with good engineering practice;\nLeave the recommendation capability in a stronger and more maintainable state than you found it.\nBenefits\nTHE PERKS OF BECOMING A MINDER:\nPrivate medical subscription\nPrivate medical subscription for children\nCounseling and psychotherapy services\nReimbursement for eyeglasses\nSelf-proposal salary process\nAnnual profit distribution, subject to company performance and board decision\nMindera Unit Plan\nFlexible benefits options (sports, medical, cultural, donations)\nTrainings and learning opportunities to grow within your role\nCoaching and development guidance\n25 days holiday\nFlexibility to choose where you work from\nVacation incentive\nParties, gatherings & trips\nWHY MINDERA?\nWe're thrilled to have the opportunity to share with you what it's like to be a part of the Mindera community.\nWe're a group of friendly and talented individuals who work together to bring projects to life, in a fun, politics-free environment.\nOur culture is all about being adaptable and self-organized. We want Minders to take risks, make decisions, work together and feel free to be their most authentic selves, every single day.\nWe work closely with our clients to truly understand their products and develop high-performance, resilient, and scalable software systems that make a real impact for their users and businesses, worldwide.\nWe are proud of our work, we're always learning and growing in our Agile and collaborative environment, and we hope you'll love it here just as much as we do!\nCheck out our Handbook & get to know us better: https://mindera.com/handbook.pdf \nMindera around the world: Porto, Portugal | Aveiro, Portugal | Coimbra, Portugal | Leicester, UK | San Diego, USA | San Francisco, USA | Chennai, India | Bengaluru, India | Blumenau, Brazil | Cluj-Napoca, Romania | Valencia, Spain | Casablanca, Morocco | Melbourne, Victoria, Australia & Remote","description_format":"text","description_chars":7346,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["IT Outsourcing & Dedicated Teams","Custom Software Development"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-14T11:59:26Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":65,"band":"ok","label":"Likely open","p_open":1,"p_active":0.866,"p_room":0.75,"age_days":51,"expected_fill_days":70,"reasons":["conf:4","velocity","win:late"],"computed_at":"2026-11-04T06:34:25Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/mindera-lead-data-scientist","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/mindera-lead-data-scientist.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-04T20:15:22Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":31226,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-05T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":54054},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=54054"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fmindera-lead-data-scientist"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fmindera-lead-data-scientist"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fmindera-lead-data-scientist"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/mindera-lead-data-scientist\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fmindera-lead-data-scientist"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":902004}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"mindera.com","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":902004},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. Docs: https://alion.io/developers"}}