Data Scientist

Data Scientist – Data Engineering \& Web Scraping (Debt Tracing) – Utilities Sector * Rate: £500/day (Inside IR35) * Contract: 3 months rolling * Location: Primarily remote, with occasional travel to Nottingham or London * Sector: Utilities Role: * Build and maintain web scraping pipelines to gather structured and unstructured data for customer tracing purposes * Identify and locate customers in arrears using data engineering techniques across multiple public and internal data sources * Design entity resolution/fuzzy matching logic to link historic account records to newly sourced contact data (address, employer, phone, social) * Build scalable ETL pipelines to ingest, clean, and structure scraped data into existing data warehouse/CRM systems * Apply NLP/text extraction techniques to pull relevant details from unstructured web sources * Work closely with Collections/Recoveries teams to prioritise and validate traced leads * Ensure all data collection and processing is compliant with UK GDPR and FCA guidance on debt collection conduct Skills required: * Strong Python (Scrapy, BeautifulSoup, Selenium/Playwright) * SQL and data warehousing experience (Snowflake/BigQuery/Redshift or similar) * Record linkage/fuzzy matching (fuzzywuzzy, recordlinkage, dedupe or similar) * ETL/orchestration tools (Airflow, dbt) * NLP/text mining exposure * Experience in financial services, utilities, or collections/recoveries a strong plus * Understanding of GDPR/data compliance in a regulated environment