Senior Manager - Data Science (Martech/CRM)

About the role

VML, part of WPP, is a leading creative company that combines brand experience, customer experience, and commerce, creating connected brands to drive growth. VML is celebrated for its innovative and human first, award-winning work for blue chip client partners including AstraZeneca, Colgate-Palmolive, Dell, Ford, Microsoft, Nestlé, The Coca-Cola Company, and Wendy's. The agency is recognized by the Forrester Wave™ Reports, as a Leader among Marketing Creative and Content Service Providers, Commerce Services, Global Digital Experience Services, Global Marketing Services and, most recently, Marketing Measurement & Optimization. In addition, VML's specialist health network, VML Health, is one of the world's largest and most awarded health agencies. VML's global network is powered by 26,000 talented people across 55+ markets, with principal offices in Kansas City, New York, Detroit, London, São Paulo, Shanghai, Singapore, and Sydney. About WPP WPP is the trusted growth partner for the world's leading brands. We unite cutting-edge media intelligence and data solutions, world-class creativity, next-generation production, transformative enterprise solutions and expert strategic counsel in a single company - powered by exceptional talent and our agentic marketing platform, WPP Open, to help our clients navigate change, capture opportunity and deliver transformational growth. For more information, visit WPP.com . We're looking for a Lead Data Scientist and manager of the practice to lead this next chapter. You'll own the data science practice end-to-end; building and managing the team, advising clients on what's possible, and delivering work that raises the bar for what data can do within marketing ecosystems. Client demand is growing. And you'll have real autonomy to shape what this practice becomes: the product offering, the ways of working, and how data science becomes an accelerator that elevates the work of activation, engineering, and insights teams around you. What will your day look like? Lead & Grow the Team : Manage a team of data scientists end-to-end; hiring, onboarding, personal development, performance conversations, and day-to-day support. Coach team members technically and professionally. Identify skill gaps, plan for future needs, and scale the team as the practice grows. Foster a culture of knowledge sharing, curiosity, and quality. Build, Not Just Oversee: Personally contribute to high-complexity initiatives; designing and shipping ML models, training and inference pipelines, and experimentation frameworks. Bring deep, hands-on expertise in marketing-relevant techniques: uplift modelling, propensity scoring, attribution, next best action, segmentation, causal inference, and recommender systems. Set the technical bar through code and craft, not just review. Advise Clients Strategically : Partner with account and strategy teams on scoping, proposals, and commercial conversations: you're a credible voice in the room when clients are deciding where to invest. Act as a trusted data advisor. Proactively identify gaps and untapped opportunities in clients' data and marketing ecosystems. Translate complex findings into business recommendations. Anticipate business needs and challenges; build lasting client relationships as the go-to person for data science matters. Deliver End-to-End with Quality: Lead complex data science initiatives from hypothesis and experimentation through model development, validation, and activation. Collaborate closely with Data Engineers and Architects so solutions are grounded in solid infrastructure. Own quality across all team deliverables, with discipline in statistical methods, reproducibility, and insight generation. Lead the team into Agentic AI: Champion agentic AI as both a way of working and a delivery capability. Coach data scientists to adopt AI-native engineering practices (agentic coding, AI-assisted development, prompt and context engineering) and lead the design of agentic solutions for clients: from internal accelerators to production-grade agents embedded in marketing workflows. We expect you have shipped or prototyped agentic solutions and have a clear point of view on where they create real value. Apply CRM & Marketing Domain Expertise: Contextualize data science within clients' CRM, campaign, and personalization strategies. Leverage hands-on experience with platforms like Adobe AEP, Salesforce Data Cloud, or Braze to extend marketing measurement and influence communications from a data perspective. Shape the Practice: Establish guidelines, ways of working, and reusable accelerators. Maintain a backlog of data science use cases. Contribute to roadmapping, maturity frameworks, and the data science product catalogue alongside the Global Data Practice Lead. Who are you going to work with? You will lead a small, technically capable team of data scientists who need a manager with both technical credibility and genuine investment in their

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