Deepak

Every time a customer comes to our website or to our store, we want them to feel appreciated – to feel that we understand what they are looking for. Because that’s what M&S is built on: trust and love of the brand. 
Our goal is to personalise every digital interaction for our customers. So, it’s great knowing that the company is embracing technological solutions to continue its legacy of quality experience. Every time we have a quarterly get-together or a performance update from the CFO, personalisation and data science and technology are always there. 

At M&S, we have a wide variety of colleagues with a wealth of different experiences, who all share a genuine passion for harnessing data to improve people’s lives. And we’re in a unique position where we can actually help many different kinds of people, from our customers to our colleagues in store and in our support centre. 
What I like most about my role is the balance between collaboration and coding. That balance is important to me, and so are our team days where we all get together and discuss things that are important to us all as a group. Our most recent team day was all about ensuring that we have enough time to focus on career progression. 

We want to make sure that people who come here have a path they can follow, but we also want them to know that that path doesn’t just lead in one direction. You’re never put in a box, so you can stay on the Data Science track, or you can go into Project Management, Data Engineering, or Machine Learning Operations. Or you can take a completely new path altogether – M&S will support your career, no matter which direction it takes. 

Personally, I want to become a solid senior data scientist in the next three to five years. Right now, I’m getting exposure to all kinds of projects, from your more traditional regression and classification problems to newer techniques such as causal modelling, which I’m learning more about at the moment. It’s a really exciting topic that’s going to help us provide even better offerings to our customers. 

We also run two hackathons every year, and in the most recent one, I was part of a team using ChatGPT, which allowed me to get exposure to prompt engineering. That was really cool, because it put more arrows in my quiver. Ultimately, all these experiences are adding to my development and helping me to find what I want to do in the long term.