Jobs in Watford, eng, uk

About the role

As an AI Scientist at Zellis you'll play a pivotal role in embedding AI-driven solutions across the Zellis HR, Workforce Management and Payroll platform and driving through their adoption. You'll work within a small, highly creative and research-driven team, designing, developing and deploying compute-efficient, powerful, and safe AI models that provide tangible value to our clients. Our mission is to redefine how AI can expand Zellis' client base, ensuring AI goes beyond surface-level functionality to drive meaningful transformation across HR and pay solutions.

You'll develop and implement AI technologies that enhance automation, decision-making, and predictive capabilities. You'll also ensure our AI solutions adhere to strict ethical, privacy, and security standards while maximising business impact.

At Zellis, we balance research with practical deployment, ensuring that AI innovations translate into business value. We embrace a fast-paced, entrepreneurial mindset, enabling us to iterate rapidly and refine our AI strategies based on continuous learning and real-world feedback.

In this role your key responsibilities will include :

AI Research and Model Development

• Conducting research in AI, using a full range of machine learning and GenAI techniques to develop solutions across the entire HR lifecycle.
• Designing and optimising AI that enhances automation and decision-making.
• Ensuring AI models are scalable and efficient for real-world enterprise deployment.
• Experimenting with different machine learning and GenAI techniques, including prompt engineering, RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation), fine-tuning of LLMs, RLHF (reinforcement learning with human feedback), and adversarial techniques.
• Evaluating AI model performance using statistical and business-driven metrics.
• Working on natural language to SQL AI transformations to extract data value.
• Working on natural language to other meta-language translation / transformation (e.g. LaTeX / mermail.io for diagramming, or natural language to code).
• Speech to text.
• Developing explainable AI approaches for transparency and trust.

AI Integration into HR, Workforce Management, and Payroll Systems

AI Ethics, Privacy, and Security

Collaboration and Cross-Functional Work

Skills & experience

Technical Expertise

AI Ethics and Responsible AI

Problem Solving and Critical Thinking

Business Acumen and HR Domain Knowledge

Collaboration and Communication

Adaptability and Continuous Learning

Benefits & culture

At Zellis we create AI-enabled HR, workforce management and payroll products and services, to power exceptional employee experiences so that you and your people do better. Our multi-award-winning products pay over five million employees a year, with almost half (42%) of the FTSE 100, 50% of the top retailers and 30% of the top universities in the UK & Ireland as customers, making us the largest provider of Payroll and HR software and managed services.

Our vision is to be the clear leader in pay, reward, analytics, and people experiences. We're passionate about creating an environment where people want to join, belong to, and be part of a progressive organisation. Our values, which were defined with input from of our 3,000+ colleagues, we live and breathe every day :

Our people are critical to our ongoing success; we're proud of our inclusive culture that gives you the platform to grow, challenge the status quo and play a crucial role in further enhancing our market position as the leading provider of HR & Payroll software and services. With Zellis you'll have the chance to stretch and challenge yourself in an environment that's varied, flexible and hugely supportive.

We also love to reward and recognise our brilliant colleagues. As part of your benefits package, you'll receive :