Data Scientist

Job Title

Data Scientist

Hiring Manager

David Corney

Salary

£41,000 - £50,000 per year depending on experience

Location

Remote first within the UK. We work primarily from home but also have an office available in Central London for quarterly in-person meetings with the AI team and with meetings with the rest of Full Fact. You can expect to travel to the office at least 4 times per year.

Please note that we do not hold a UKVI Sponsorship Licence, so we cannot consider sponsoring a visa applicant or issuing a Certificate of Sponsorship.

Reporting to

Senior Data Scientist

Employment Type

Permanent

We are happy to talk about flexible working, including part time.

Application Closing Date

10 am on Monday 30 November 2026.

Introduction to the role

At a moment when our information environment is under significant strain, this is an exciting opportunity: a role with real autonomy, meaningful mission, and genuine influence at the intersection of AI and web scale engineering.

As a Data Scientist at Full Fact, you will make sure those who make false claims in public can't get away with it. This is a rare opportunity to work for a non-profit tackling internet-scale misinformation problems with a global user base. The fact checks our users publish are seen hundreds of millions of times each year and embedded in many of the most well-known internet services.

Every day, 100s of people around the world find, check, archive and challenge false claims identified by AI-enabled products produced by Full Fact. Your job will be to help us improve and expand this software for our growing user base. You’ll be working at the intersection of software engineering, machine learning, and real-world impact.

Whether you're responding to a new feature request from users in Nigeria covering a general election, helping fact checkers in Australia verify politicians' claims in real time, or enabling health-focused charities to identify and reduce harmful content spreading online, you will be working at pace on projects that make a substantial difference in the world. In this role that means prototyping and developing features with robust APIs, writing clean Python, and working closely with engineers and other data scientists to bring AI-powered features into production.

It is an exciting time to join Full Fact. You will be joining a team of technical, data, and product specialists working on genuinely novel problems in applied AI, from natural language processing and claim detection to trust benchmarks and harm detection.

We will support you to keep learning, and if you are interested in applying but not sure you have all the skills, please do apply. We are open both to supporting learning on the job and to rearranging tasks within the team to suit the skillsets of the best applicant

Job Definition

As an experienced Data Scientist, you will be a key contributor to a number of new and ongoing projects. You will use your technical skills to design and develop software that identifies and counters misinformation. You will develop and use a variety of datasets to train and evaluate machine learning models. You will work with non-technical colleagues and other users of our tools. You will participate in code review, both of your own and of others' code.

Outcomes

Some of the projects you will be contributing to include:

• Extending our new “Public Interest AI Trust Benchmark” to provide a deeper analysis of how reliably AI chatbots answer everyday questions.

• Spotting potentially misleading and harmful claims across a broad range of media

• Identifying and characterising potentially harmful narratives as they spread

• Helping to integrate the technologies you build into products that will have an immediate use, for both fact checkers and journalists

• Identifying sightings of previously checked claims at real-time speed

• Measuring and improving the quality of the system

What we are looking for from you

Political impartiality and sensitivity:

You are committed to the political neutrality of our work and have a good understanding of impartiality (please see the rules on our website).

Understanding of public debate in the UK and sensitivity to the political context we work in.

Skills/competencies

• Software engineering for data science. You are familiar with the software development lifecycle. You can design, code, test, correct and document moderate to complex programs and scripts from agreed specifications with or without AI coding tools. You can use agreed standards and tools. Collaborate with others to review and refine specifications where appropriate.

• AI and data science innovation. You are broadly familiar with recent advances in AI including LLMs. You proactively research and explore areas of innovation in our industry. You can identify the value for innovation within the organisation.

• Applied maths, statistics and scientific practices. You understand and can help teams apply a range of practices. You know how to develop deeper expertise on a narrower range of specialisms. You can start to apply emerging theory to practical situations.

• Developing data science capability. You promote and monitor continuous professional development within your organisation. You know how to develop knowledge of cutting-edge techniques and share this knowledge. You can develop and support data science capability across the organisation.

• Domain expertise. You can create automated fact-checking products that are proportionate to the operational benefit and achieve significant impact. You know how to present analysis and visualisations in clear ways to communicate complex messages. You can develop data science communication skills within your team. You support the evolution of data governance and take responsibility for applying ethical data science.

• Understanding analysis across the product life cycle. You understand and can help teams apply a range of techniques to analyse data and provide insight. You are proactive and can present compelling findings that inform wider decisions. You are starting to apply innovative approaches to resolve problems.

What we offer

A salary between £41,000 - £50,000 per year depending on experience.

Workplace Pension

Generous holidays:

• 25 days holiday plus bank holidays.

• In addition, we usually close the office for a period between Christmas and New Year.

Comfortable, centrally located London office with good transport links

Employee Assistance Programme

Emergency Housing Loan and support for moving home

Volunteering day

How to apply

Upload your CV and cover letter using the link below by 10 am on Monday 30 November.

Our recruitment platform will remove identifying details such as email addresses to allow us to sift applications anonymously.

Before applying, please read the requirements we place on staff to protect Full Fact’s independence and non-partisanship

How the application process will work

The interview panel will be Ellie Ashman (Head of AI), David Corney (Senior Data Scientist), and James McMinn (Senior Engineer).

The process starts off with an anonymised covering letter and CV. This will be read by at least two people to produce a shortlist for the panel interview.

The first round interviews will be an audio (not video) interview, lasting no more than half an hour, at a time that’s convenient for you. We will record it so at least two people can review each interview to decide who we invite back for the second round. The recordings will be deleted at the end of the process.

The second round will include a structured interview during which you will be asked to present some of your recent work in any way you choose. The interview will be with the full panel by video and last no more than an hour. We’ll tell you everything you need to know to prepare in advance.