Role overview
Science and Technology Facilities Council
Salary: £23,493 per annum
Contract Type: Fixed Term - 12 weeks
Hours: Full-time
Location: Daresbury Laboratory, Keckwick Lane, Daresbury, WA4 4AD
Closing date: 8 th March 2026
Interview: Virtually via Microsoft Teams in April 2026
Start date: June 2026
The Hartree Centre helps UK businesses and organisations of any size to explore and adopt supercomputing, data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies for enhanced productivity, smarter innovation and economic growth. Backed by significant UK government funding and strategic partnerships with industry leaders such as IBM, Atos and the University of Liverpool, the Hartree Centre is home to some of the most advanced digital technologies and experts in the UK.
Our experts collaborate with industry and the research community in all sectors to explore the latest emerging technologies, upskill teams, and apply practical digital solutions to individual and industry-wide challenges for societal and economic benefit
We are seeking to recruit a Data Science Summer Placement to join our Data Science group. Collaborating with our industry and research partners, we develop tools, frameworks, and applications to accelerate the adoption of emerging technologies across UK industry and the public sector.
This placement will be working within a long-term collaboration between the Hartree Centre and an international research partner in the field of astronomy. You will work alongside your colleagues, and our collaborators, to implement data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence solutions to monitor operations at a leading international astronomical observatory. There will be scope for you to be able to take ownership of one of several identified potential sub-projects. You will regularly interact with our other technical teams, including AI and Software Engineering, providing you with a fantastic opportunity to understand how real-world solutions are developed and delivered across the Hartree Centre.
What You’ll Learn
- Data Science Context: Relationship with computer science, statistics, and software engineering; impact of different schools of thought.
- Governance & Ethics: Data security, bias, fairness, compliance, and international regulations.
- Data Systems: Processing and storage (on-premise vs cloud), database types (relational, NoSQL, real-time).
- Modelling, event detection, predictive analytics, machine learning, AI, NLP, computer vision.
- Development Standards: Programming practices, testing, source control.
- Data Landscape: Sources (files, systems, APIs, social media), formats (structured/unstructured), patterns in real-world data.
- Problem Reformulation: Translate organisational challenges into Data Science problems.
- Data Engineering: Source, pipeline, transform, and store data.
- Programming & Analysis: Use appropriate languages/tools for manipulation, visualisation, and integration.
- Model Building: Statistical analysis, feature engineering, machine learning, optimisation.
- Solution Implementation: Evaluate architectures, deployment options, ROI, and scalability.
What you'll work on
Within this placement, responsibilities will include some of the following:
- Work on building solutions to customers’ data science challenges.
- Learn and apply data-centric analytics and AI technologies.
- Regular collaboration with academic partners, validating conclusions and presenting results to customers, including using advanced visualisation.
- Publish non-confidential results to build the Hartree Centre and your own profiles in the community