Data Scientist

Company Description

Sika is a specialty chemicals company with a globally leading position in the development and production of systems and products for bonding, sealing, damping, reinforcing, and protection in the building sector and automotive industry. Sika has subsidiaries in 103 countries around the world and, in over 400 factories, produces innovative technologies for customers worldwide. In doing so, it plays a crucial role in enabling the transformation of the construction and vehicle industries toward greater environmental compatibility. With more than 33,000 employees, the company generated sales of CHF 11.2 billion in 2023.

Job Description

Sika Data Science is a young and growing division of Sika UK. Having begun as an arm of the UK R&D department, it has rapidly developed into a team that works on a much larger and more diverse scale: ranging from using traditional data science techniques to optimise the efficiency of operations and monitoring product quality and consistency, to harnessing the power of state-of-the-art AI solutions to identify novel construction materials and service Sika global with LLM technologies. The objectives of the team have evolved equally rapidly: we now aim to use data science to improve the productivity and sustainability of every Sika department. 

Purpose of the Role

Globally, Sika R&D is undergoing a significant transformation in our approach to data recording and storage. As this bastion of valuable research data grows, it will demand the expertise of a data scientist with a strong understanding of chemistry to valorise the data. This will come in the form of significant opportunities for the application of data science to R&D on both the small and large scales; six-sigma approaches can be used to expedite individual development pipelines, and, over the long term, structured data portions can be identified as key candidates for data engineering and the training of machine learning solutions. As the Data Science team seeks to contribute more to Sika global, such deployments will become increasingly valuable for product catalogue optimisation with the ever-growing pool of R&D data.

The Opportunity:  

• You will engineer and valorise the data generated by Sika Liquid Applied Membranes and Flooring R&D through a combination of organic chemistry and advanced data science.
• You will identify the needs of the R&D departments and map and deliver solutions, supporting to Sika’s global research community, employing techniques such as design of experiments, modelling and six-sigma methodologies.
• You will actively seek further data sources which can be valorised through common data science initiatives, and support in the construction of large-scale solutions to harness these repositories.

The Rewards:

You will be rewarded with a competitive salary, and a sweep of great benefits. We pride ourselves on our total reward package:

• Bonus Scheme
• Holiday 25 days rising to 28 days with service, plus bank holidays
• Hybrid Working
• Core Hours Working
• A company pension contribution of up to 10%
• Private healthcare for you, with option to add family
• Group life cover at 6x your annual salary
• Global Income Protection (PHI)
• Enhanced maternity and paternity pay
• Staff discount platform & Cycle to Work scheme
• Dedicated Service Awards for reaching key milestones
• Selected discounted Sika products

The Support:

As this role requires a deep knowledge of Sika’s Liquid Applied Membranes and Flooring technology, you will be trained to understand the chemistry behind these systems, with full support from our existing team. We are a small team who prioritise satisfaction and excellence in our work, and we will do our utmost to ensure that you are content in your role, accommodating for your needs. We aim to foster an honest and democratic culture, where all voices are equally important, and everyone is treated with respect.

The Skills:

You must be hungry to learn and eager to expand your technical abilities, focusing on the modelling of chemical data. You’ll need a keen nose for where data science can be harnessed to drive productivity, both in the small and large scales, and where new sources of information can be harnessed. To these ends, you will require a solid background in organic chemistry, with significant experience in data science using Python, and an excellent understanding of the state of machine learning and deep learning as applied to the chemical sciences.

The Future: 

Working at Sika bestows you with the opportunity to progress within a global company across a variety of business areas. You’ll learn about different sectors of the business, getting the chance to build networks with various departments across the world. As your technical and interpersonal skills develop, you will increasingly contribute more to global scope, business-transformative initiatives, which will yield you the opportunity to rise through the ranks of Sika.

Qualifications

• 2+ years of experience in Python-powered data science
• Demonstrable deployment of machine or deep learning solutions, preferably applied to chemical data
• Excellence in organic chemistry, preferably with a degree-level qualification