Job Information
Norstella Lead Data Scientist in Remote, United Kingdom
Lead Data Scientist
Company: Norstella
Location: Remote, United Kingdom
Date Posted: Feb 6, 2026
Employment Type: Full Time
Job ID: R-1703
Description
About Norstella
Norstella is a premier and critical global life sciences data and AI solutions provider dedicated to improving patient access to life-saving therapies. Norstella supports pharmaceutical and biotech companies across the full drug development lifecycle — from pipeline to patient. Our mission is simple: to help our clients bring therapies to market faster and more efficiently, ultimately impacting patient lives.
Norstella unites market-leading brands - Citeline, Evaluate, MMIT, Panalgo, Skipta and The Dedham Group and delivers must-have answers and insights, leveraging AI, for critical strategic, clinical, and commercial decision-making. We help our clients:
Accelerate the drug development cycle
Assess competition and bring the right drugs to market
Make data driven commercial and financial decisions
Match and recruit patients for clinical trials
Identify and address barriers to therapies
The Team
In this role as a Generative AI Lead Scientist you will report into the Head of Data Science, within Norstella. Your role will be to work with a dedicate group of data scientists and developers to use LLMs and related technologies to design and build products which will help answer complex customer questions directly, with citations and sources. We have a multi-functional team consisting of pharmaceutical industry experts, R&D, data engineering and data scientists to rapidly prototype using both our existing and newly acquired datasets across the pharmaceutical life cycle.
Scope of the Role
In this role as a Generative AI Lead Scientist you will:
Work with our Product leadership within Norstella to define and shape new offerings using Generative AI
Manage a team of data scientists and developers to provide Generative AI-enabled microservices to the front end dev team
Manage a roadmap of Generative AI work, mixing new product development and enhancements to existing services
Define reference architectures suitable to answer complex questions, including via code interpreting, LLM tool use and leveraging secondary data science models
Coach and train a team of data scientists and developers to use these architectures
Stay up-to-date, constantly learning about advances in the field, and deliver periodic presentations to the data science team on these developments
Perform other duties, as assigned
How You'll Succeed
Ultimately our goal is to smooth patient access to life-saving therapies. You will work with R&D pharma specialists to understand a problem which is hindering developing and releasing effective new pharma products which we believe we can help with. After understanding the problem you will conceptualise potential solutions; this will involve breaking down the problem into individual steps, and identifying which of them can be solved with available LLMs and other algorithms. Finally, an overall solution can be packaged together with multiple models chained together, mixed with classical logic and business rules.
After conceiving potential solution(s), you will define a set of projects for the data scientists and python developers to implement your solution as a proof-of-concept. You will deliver indicative results from your PoC into datasets for exploration by the broader multi-functional team. You will also perform code reviews with the data science team to examine their implementation and consider ways of strengthening the final codebase and methodology.
After iterating the design with the multi-functional team as part of customer-led product development, you might convert your prototype into a full product. This will involve productionising code from you and the team to a high standard, containerisation, and deployment of the algorithm, usually as an API in AWS SageMaker, or for smaller pieces Lambdas which invoke models via API. Over time you may revisit this product, re-evaluate its performance, and redesign/improve as required.
Essential Requirements
Degree at Masters level or better in a STEM field such as Maths, Physics, Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience
Leadership experience, line managing data scientists or other highly specialised professionals
Excellent communication skills when working with a broader development and product team
Knowledge of Scrum, Kanban, and other Agile methodologies, as well as breaking down tasks into Jira tickets
Proven experience using LLMs and prompt engineering inside applications to solve problems not tractable with older techniques
Excellent knowledge of python and core data science libraries including Pandas, NumPy and other similar libraries
Nice to have
Experience with AWS especially in relation to ML workflows with SageMaker, serverless compute and storage such as S3 and Snowflake
Knowledge of the pharmaceutical industry, in particular the stages of pharmaceutical product development
Ability to rapidly prototype new product ideas with a basic familiarity across the full stack, webapp to database
Experience using external APIs in a production context
Benefits
25 days annual leave, 4 days for volunteering and a personal day
Flexible working and flextime policies
5% pension match
Group Life Assurance (100% employer funded)
Group Income Protection (100% employer funded)
Other voluntary benefits such as: Dental, Cash Plan, PMI Excess Cover, Health Screening & Critical Illness
Maternity, Paternity & Adoption leave
Evaluate is an equal opportunities employer and do not discriminate on the grounds of gender, sexual orientation, marital or civil partner status, pregnancy or maternity, gender reassignment, race, colour, nationality, ethnic or national origin, religion or belief, disability or age. Our ethos is to respect and value people’s differences, to help everyone achieve more at work as well as in their personal lives so that they feel proud of the part they play in our success. We believe that all decisions about people at work should be based on the individual’s abilities, skills, performance and behaviour and our business requirements. Evaluate operates a zero tolerance policy to any form of discrimination, abuse or harassment.
Norstella is an equal opportunity employer. All job applicants will receive equal treatment regardless of race, creed, color, religion, alienage or national origin, ancestry, citizenship status, age, physical or mental disability or handicap, medical condition, sex (including pregnancy and pregnancy-related conditions), marital or domestic partner status, military or veteran status, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, genetic information, reproductive health decision making, or any other protected characteristic as established by federal, state, or local law.