Senior Data Scientist, Lyst, GB

Lyst is a global fashion shopping platform founded in London in 2010 and catering to over 160M shoppers per year. We offer our customers the largest assortment of premium & luxury fashion products in one place, curating pieces from 27,000 of the world's leading brands and stores. In 2025, Lyst joined Zozo, operators of Zozotown, the leading fashion e-commerce platform in Japan. This partnership marks a bold new era for Lyst, as we accelerate our vision and work together to transform the future of fashion shopping through AI and technology. 

At Lyst, we obsess over the customer, providing a search & discovery experience which offers inspiration, fulfilment, and personalisation. We believe that fashion is amazing but shopping for fashion often isn't, and use our technology, data and creativity to bring more joy, greater choice and fewer fails. Our mission is to help fashion shoppers make better choices and help fashion partners find better audiences as the category-leading destination for every fashion shopper.

The Role

We're looking for an experienced and impact-driven Senior Data Scientist to join our Discovery team, focused on helping customers find products they love through better search, recommendations, and personalisation.

This is a high-responsibility role that blends advanced modeling, analytical investigations and project ownership. You’ll take the lead on projects that improve the core discovery experience—such as personalisation, relevance ranking, and multi-modal retrieval—as well as conduct deep investigations into user behaviour and feature performance.

You’ll be working across the full research and experimentation lifecycle: from framing the problem and exploring the data, to prototyping models, running offline evaluations, and validating ideas through AB testing. You'll also contribute to literature reviews and research spikes—for example, investigating how to apply new developments in vector search, embeddings, or LLMs to our discovery stack.

This is a senior position, so you'll be expected to run projects independently: shaping roadmaps, communicating findings with clarity, mentoring junior team members, and collaborating closely with engineers, PMs and analysts to deliver measurable user and business impact.

We work primarily in Python and SQL, with tools like Scikit-learn, Tensorflow, PyTorch and Pandas. Our ML stack runs on AWS and Sagemaker. We value clean, documented, well-tested and reviewed code—and have the tooling and culture to support this.

Responsibilities

• Lead data science projects that improve product discovery features like search, recommendations and browsing
• Research and prototype new approaches using structured data, text, image and multi-modal embeddings
• Design and run offline evaluations to assess model changes before launch
• Conduct statistical investigations into customer behaviour and funnel performance (e.g. search abandonment, filter usage, session patterns)
• Run literature reviews and research spikes on emerging techniques—e.g. LLM-assisted retrieval, hybrid recommenders, contrastive learning
• Collaborate with ML engineers to move promising prototypes into production
• Design and analyse AB tests to evaluate impact on discovery metrics (e.g. conversion, engagement, retention)
• Present complex results to non-technical stakeholders with clarity and strategic insight
• Mentor junior data scientists, delegate tasks where appropriate, and help set technical direction