Lead Data Scientist

Role summary

Brightflag is looking for a Lead Data Scientist to join its expanding team in Ireland. This is an individual contributor position, so it does not include people management. The role suits someone who has built machine learning solutions for complex business challenges, ideally in a SaaS product environment, and who is comfortable taking work from early analysis through to production delivery.

You will help create product-focused data science solutions that improve customer value, working closely with product and engineering teams. The environment values autonomy, creativity, and practical problem-solving rather than a routine model-building approach. The work will include both classical machine learning and emerging generative AI use cases.

Location and working arrangement

The role can be based anywhere in Ireland. You may work from the office, fully remote from within Ireland, or through a hybrid setup depending on what suits your lifestyle. Quarterly team meet-ups in Brightflag’s Dublin office are required, giving the team a chance to connect and collaborate in person.

Work permit sponsorship and self-sponsorship are not available for this position.

Key work areas

• Take ownership of the end-to-end model development journey, starting with exploratory analysis and proof of concept and continuing through production deployment.
• Build classification, regression, and clustering models to address business needs.
• Create generative AI solutions that can produce text, reports, and insights for new product features.
• Work with natural language text to extract meaning, surface insights, and transform data.
• Research and test new machine learning methods and libraries to solve real business problems.
• Partner with engineering colleagues to bring models and AI solutions into production.

Experience and technical background

Success in this role requires strong experience in machine learning, especially within a software product setting. You should be highly capable in Python and comfortable handling ambiguous, fast-moving product work.

The ideal candidate should also bring strong NLP knowledge, familiarity with text representation methods such as TF-IDF and topic modelling, and exposure to tools and techniques like Word2vec, transformers, and text embeddings. Experience with generative AI product applications, including tools such as LangChain or LlamaIndex, is helpful but not mandatory. Knowledge of RAG-style patterns is also beneficial.

Further useful background includes multi-class and multi-label classification, regression modelling, time-series forecasting, clustering and segmentation, and working with common Python libraries such as NumPy, SciPy, and scikit-learn. Experience building neural network models with Keras, TensorFlow, or PyTorch is also relevant.

Additional strengths include delivering product-oriented solutions collaboratively, working independently, and shipping work alongside product and software engineering teams.

Bonus experience

It would be an advantage to have experience deploying machine learning systems in the cloud, particularly using AWS machine learning services. Familiarity with CI/CD tools such as Jenkins, AWS CodeBuild, Bitbucket Pipelines, or GitHub Actions would be useful.

Experience with Docker and containerised environments, Bash scripting, Linux shell usage, and Git-based version control is also a plus. Exposure to dashboarding tools such as Power BI, Qlik, or Tableau would be nice to have, though it is not essential.

Life at Brightflag

• Opportunity to make a real impact on the direction of the product and the company.
• Challenging technical and business problems that support learning and career growth.
• High levels of trust and autonomy in a fast-growing environment.
• A supportive, friendly, values-led, and inclusive team culture.
• Competitive pay.
• 25 days of holiday.
• Comprehensive health insurance, life insurance, and income protection/long-term illness cover.
• Flexible work patterns and location choices, with a blend of office and home working available.

Inclusion statement

Brightflag says it values diversity and inclusion and welcomes different perspectives. The company states that it does not discriminate on the basis of gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, civil or family status, age, disability, or race.

About the company

Brightflag is an AI-powered enterprise legal management platform that helps corporate legal teams work with more clarity, efficiency, and control. Its patented AI, built using more than 100,000 hours of legal and engineering expertise, supports in-house teams with matters, spend management, and collaboration with outside counsel. Brightflag is trusted by major global organisations and is part of the Legal & Regulatory division of Wolters Kluwer.