Senior AI Data Scientist — Agentic Process Development

Company Overview team.blue is the market leader in enabling digital success for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) across Europe, catering to over 3 million customers in 25+ languages. Our mission is to make online business success simpler, by providing our customers with all the tools and resources they need to excel online and remain ahead of the curve. Position Overview

We are looking for a Senior AI Data Scientist to streamline HR processes at team.blue — not by analysing them, but by building agentic systems to run them. Recruitment, onboarding, performance, rewards and offboarding are each multi-step processes spanning several systems and up to 25 countries, and your mandate would be to create systems that can streamline them end to end.

The method matters more than the domain: map a process, quantify what it costs in headcount, score which steps an agent could take, build a proof of concept, and take it to production. This work sits closer to building autonomous, side-effecting systems than to building predictive models. The agents you design would be able to revoke IT access, issue signed contracts, and flag pay outliers into approval workflows. A wrong output here is not a bad number someone can catch — it is a high impact action taken in the world. What we are actually screening for:

Not whether you can hand-roll a gradient-boosted tree. LLM coding tools can do that faster than you can. Classical ML and applied statistics are the entry fee for this role — necessary, and assumed. Everyone we are talking to has them. What separates candidates is whether you can build an agent that is robust, cost-effective and trustworthy — with deterministic operations rather than “LLM does everything” patterns. Building a demo is now easy. Knowing whether to trust one is not. We also mean end to end literally. You write it, you containerise it, you instrument it, and you own it when it breaks. Your day would involve:

Time with the HR Ops lead mapping how a leaver actually gets offboarded across 19 countries — then turning that into a process inventory with FTE cost attached per step

Facilitating a half-day session with Talent, Rewards and HR Ops leads to score automation candidates on impact, feasibility and LLM/tool fit — extracting requirements live from people who do not think in data models

Designing the state transitions: what triggers, what branches, which systems get called, where it waits, when it escalates, and what happens when step 4 of 9 fails

Building the guardrails before the capability — dry-run mode, an approval gate ahead of anything irreversible, least-privilege scoped credentials, a rollback path

Deciding where a human stays in the loop, at what confidence threshold, and designing a review queue they will actually use

Writing evals for output that precision and recall do not capture: task-completion rate, hallucination rate, gendered or culturally biased language in AI-drafted reviews

Wiring an agent to a webhook instead of a nightly batch pull — and making the handler idempotent so a retry does not offboard someone twice

Deciding which steps in a flow warrant a frontier model and which can run on something cheap, then proving that routing decision with numbers

Sitting in a vendor demo asking what their API actually exposes, what their data model looks like, and what integration really costs us

What you will bring:

7+ years building data and ML systems in industry, spanning both sides of the LLM shift. We want the judgment that comes from having debugged systems before you could ask a model what was wrong.

Somewhere in that history: you have shipped something that had permission to take an irreversible action affecting real customers — and you can tell us what you did to sleep at night.

Expert in Python and ML.

You ship end to end. Python someone else can still read in six months, a current toolchain (uv, Docker or an equivalent — we care that you re-examine your tooling, not which tool you landed on), your own container, your own instrumentation.

Production experience with multi-step, tool-calling LLM workflows — orchestration, retries, idempotency, timeouts, partial-failure recovery. State-machine design, not only train/serve pipelines.

Cost and latency engineering as a first-class concern — model routing, caching, batching, and the instinct to know what a flow costs per run before Finance asks.

A safety instinct for systems that take actions — staging modes, approval gates, least-privilege scoping, rollback.

Evaluation design for generative and agentic output — LLM-as-judge, golden-transcript regression suites, red-teaming.

Applied statistics you can adjudicate with. Not "can build a model" but can tell us whether a number is trustworthy and what would have to be true for it not to be.

Process mapping and quantification — you can sit with a process owner, capture what actually happens rather than what the policy says, and attach a number to it.

Facilitation — you can run a workshop with senior non-technical stakeholders and leave with requirements.

Executive-grade written business cases — cost modelling and framing for a Finance audience, which is a different skill from data storytelling.

Technical vendor evaluation — judging an HR-tech vendor on API surface, data model, extensibility and true integration cost, not on the sales deck.

What you will learn here

HR domain knowledge is learnable, and we expect you to learn it. None of the following is a barrier to entry; all of it is something you will be fluent in within a couple of months.

HR-tech fluency: ATS, LMS and payroll systems and their APIs — what they hold, and what they will let you do with it.

HR-data governance judgment. HR data carries a different sensitivity to product data. Whether to reuse interview notes for something else is a question you will learn to ask before how.

Multi-country employment-law constraints that shape what an automated exit or pay-equity process is allowed to do across our footprint.

EU AI Act obligations for high-risk systems. Recruitment, performance rating, promotion and termination all fall in scope. Prior familiarity is a plus; otherwise we build the conformity, bias-testing, human-oversight and logging practice together.

Org design and change management — you will help define where the human/agent line sits, alongside the HR leaders who own that call.

Nice to have

Master's or PhD in Computer Science, AI, Machine Learning or a related field

Existing EU AI Act / high-risk-AI-system familiarity

PromptOps at scale — versioning, testing and rollback of prompts as production artefacts

DataOps/MLOps practice: deploying and monitoring models and pipelines

Prior exposure to HRIS/HR-tech, or to automation in any audited or regulated domain

This probably is not for you if

Your agent experience is workflows in a no-code tool that you have never had to debug at a 4% silent failure rate

Your contribution ends at a notebook and someone else makes it real

You have never had to justify a token bill

You would rather build models

You can not explain the impact of your work and decisions on tangible outcomes

You need a stable spec before you start

Right to Work

At any stage, please be prepared to provide proof of eligibility to work in the country you're applying for. Unfortunately, we are unable to support relocation packages or sponsorship visas.

"Come as you are"

Everyone is welcome here. Diversity & Inclusion are at our core. Far above any technical competence, we value respect, openness, and trusted collaboration. We do not tolerate intolerance.

ESG

At team.blue , our commitment to caring for the environment and each other is at the heart of everything we do. Our latest impact report showcases our ongoing ESG efforts and ambitious sustainability goals. Interested in learning more about our dedication to making a positive impact? Check it out here . #LI-CC1