Senior Data Scientist

 

Senior Data Scientist

Location: Fully remote (UK or Norway) · Office available in central Oslo Type: Full-time, permanent Salary: [£X–£Y (UK)] / [NOK X–Y (Norway)], plus benefits

About Inspera

Inspera Assessment is a leading European e-assessment platform. Universities, awarding organisations, and governments worldwide use it to deliver secure, standardised assessments at scale. Last year, 18 million assessments were delivered on Inspera across 180+ countries. Founded in Oslo in 1999, we're an international team of 180+ EdTech professionals on a mission to impact education globally.

About the Role

We're looking for a Senior Data Scientist to join our Data & AI team, a small, high-impact group behind the data, psychometric, and AI capabilities that power Inspera's platform.

This is a hands-on, full-lifecycle role. You'll share ownership of several production systems, from psychometric engines to data pipelines and APIs, and help build the next generation of AI-powered assessment features. If you enjoy open-ended problems, picking up new domains quickly, and owning things end-to-end, this role is for you.

We're a distributed, remote-first team working across the UK, Norway, and India.

What You'll Do

● Apply statistics and optimisation: Maintain and improve our psychometric models and automated test construction engine. Bring statistical rigour to validation, data quality, and evaluation.

● Build and evolve the data platform: Develop pipelines, services, and infrastructure, and keep them reliable, performant, and well-governed.

● Build AI capabilities: Extend our production LLM features into embeddings, semantic search, RAG, and agent-ready interfaces. Explore AI enhancements to existing products, such as test-construction recommendations and content gap analysis.

● Run production systems: Share production support across our services. Investigate and resolve issues wherever they occur in the stack.

● Collaborate: Work closely with teammates in the UK, Norway, and India, as well as product and platform engineering. Explain your work clearly to technical and non-technical audiences.

Our Stack

You don't need experience with all of these. This is what you'll be working with.

● Languages & frameworks: Python, PySpark, PyTorch, FastAPI ● Data: Databricks, Delta Lake, Elasticsearch, Unity Catalog ● Cloud & infrastructure: AWS, Terraform/Terragrunt, AWS CodePipeline CI/CD ● AI: AWS Bedrock

What We're Looking For

Required

● 5 years+ of hands-on experience in data science, ML engineering, or a closely related role

 

 

● Strong Python: clean, tested, production-quality code, not just notebooks ● Solid mathematical and statistical foundations: maximum likelihood estimation, probabilistic and

latent-variable models, and optimisation, plus the ability to turn real problems into formal formulations ● Production experience: you've deployed, monitored, and debugged data-intensive or ML systems in

production ● Self-direction and clear communication: you can prioritise and drive work independently in a small

team, and you communicate well in English

Strongly Preferred We expect strong candidates to bring several of these, not all.

● Data engineering: pipelines and performant SQL/PySpark on Databricks or a similar Spark-based platform, ideally on AWS

● Applied LLM experience: you've shipped features using LLMs, embeddings, or RAG beyond the prototype stage

● Infrastructure: IaC (Terraform or similar), CI/CD, and containerisation, so you can deploy and operate what you build

● Mathematical optimisation: linear programming, constraint satisfaction, or operations research ● Education: MSc or PhD in a quantitative field ● PyTorch in production ● Elasticsearch: querying, indexing, troubleshooting ● Agentic systems: agent architectures, tool-use systems, MCP, or knowledge graphs

Nice to Have

● Psychometrics, IRT, or educational measurement (e.g. Rasch, PCM, GRM, classical test theory, test assembly)

● Background in EdTech or assessment ● BI platforms and self-serve analytics patterns

If you meet the required criteria and some of the preferred ones, please apply. We'd rather talk to a strong candidate with gaps than miss them.

What We Offer

● Impact: a permanent role in a small, technically ambitious team with direct influence on how learners worldwide are assessed

● AI strategy: the chance to shape our AI direction and build new capabilities from the ground up ● Breadth: a genuinely broad technical domain, from classical psychometrics to generative AI ● Growth: room to grow, with a high degree of freedom and responsibility ● Competitive salary and benefits (adjusted for UK or Norway) ● Flexibility: fully remote anywhere in the UK or Norway, with no required office days or travel. If you're in

Norway and like an office, our modern city-centre Oslo office and team get-togethers are there for you.

Right to work: You'll need existing right to work in the UK or Norway; we're unable to offer visa sponsorship for this role.

A Candid Note

This is a generalist role in a specialist domain. You'll regularly switch between data engineering, statistical modelling, debugging, infrastructure, and AI development. We don't expect you to be an expert in everything on day one. We do need mathematical maturity, engineering discipline, and curiosity to get up to speed quickly.

You don't need a psychometrics background. But if you'd read a paper on Item Response Theory for fun, or would enjoy learning to, and then build a working implementation the following week, we'd love to talk.