Data Scientist CV Keywords: Skills & ATS Terms to Include

Data scientist roles are filtered on ML frameworks, languages and cloud platforms, then judged on whether models reached production and moved a business metric.

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Data Scientist hard skills

Core competencies recruiters and ATS filters search for.

Machine learningStatistical modellingFeature engineeringDeep learningNatural language processing (NLP)Time series forecastingA/B testingModel deploymentExperiment designCausal inferenceData pipelinesMLOps

Data Scientist tools & software

Use the exact product names from the job ad.

PythonSQLpandasscikit-learnPyTorchTensorFlowXGBoostSparkDatabricksAWS SageMakerMLflowAirflowDockerHugging Face

Data Scientist certifications & qualifications

Write the full name and the acronym, with the year.

AWS Certified Machine Learning – SpecialtyGoogle Professional Machine Learning EngineerDatabricks Certified ML AssociateTensorFlow Developer Certificate

Data Scientist soft skills

Show these through achievements rather than listing them alone.

Communicating results to non-technical audiencesCuriosityBusiness senseCollaboration with engineeringRigourPrioritisation

Data Scientist action verbs

Start each bullet with one of these instead of "Responsible for".

BuiltTrainedDeployedImprovedDesignedForecastAutomatedProductionisedReducedEvaluated

Weak vs strong data scientist CV bullets

Built machine learning models.

Deployed an XGBoost churn model to production via SageMaker, enabling retention offers that saved £1.1M ARR in year one.

Worked on forecasting.

Built a demand forecast in PyTorch that cut stock-outs by 23% across 300 stores.

Examples are illustrative. Only use figures you can back up in an interview.

ATS tip for data scientist CVs

Say whether each model reached production. "Deployed" and "in production" are strong signals and common search terms for senior data science roles.

How to use these keywords

  1. Start from the job description, not this list. Keywords that appear in the ad matter most.
  2. Only include skills you genuinely have. You will be asked about them.
  3. Put the most important keywords in both your Skills section and your experience bullets.
  4. Use the employer's exact wording (e.g. "Python", not a synonym).
  5. Keep formatting simple: single column, standard headings, no text inside images.

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