Data Scientist - Credit Risk Analytics

Data Scientist - Credit Risk Analytics

Hybrid in London / Remote within the UK

The company

Fast, flexible finance empowers small businesses to manage their cash flow better and seize opportunities - making their business and the economy stronger as a whole. At iwoca, we do just that. We help businesses get the funds they need, when they need it, often within minutes. We’ve already made several billion in funding available to more than 100,000 businesses since we launched in 2012, and positioned ourselves as a leading Fintech in Europe. 

Our mission is to finance one million businesses. We’ll get there by continuing to make our finance ever more relevant and accessible to more businesses by combining cutting-edge technology, data science, and a 5-star customer service.

The team

The Credit Risk Analytics team at iwoca is known as the League of Lending. It’s a versatile team of analysts, developers, and credit risk managers and is the largest team in terms of data science resources.

The environment is dynamic and autonomous, with a focus on ‘getting things done’ and delivering high quality solutions. You can expect working closely with stakeholders, delivering solutions in an iterative way to incrementally add value, collecting and addressing feedback, and also providing support to the team and wider business.

The role

Your role as a Data Scientist working in credit risk will involve growing and demonstrating your skills in a number of key areas, including but not limited to…

• Model development.

  • Explore building innovative new modelling methods into our training pipeline to increase the predictive power and flexibility of our credit risk models.

  • Take responsibility for the full lifecycle of a model, including training, validation, deployment, and performance monitoring.

  • Collaborate with Data Scientists and Analysts in other teams to ensure that our model predictions are being consumed appropriately and to ensure that model interdependencies are accounted for.

• Model-driven insights.

  • Wielding our modelling and analytics tools (and adding new ones where appropriate) to discover insights. Such insights may be a learning about how our customers behave or the efficacy of a new modelling technique.

  • Effectively communicate these insights with the broader business to drive value by changing the way iwoca operates. 

• Project ownership and autonomy.

  • Independently build data science solutions to iwoca's business problems and be on a trajectory with increasing responsibility in solution design.

  • Maintain strong communications with stakeholders throughout your work to ensure that your solutions are pragmatically solving the business problem at hand and to get technical feedback for personal growth.

The requirements

Essential:

• Strong problem-solving skills in probability and statistics.

• Proficiency with data manipulation and modelling tools — e.g., pandas, statsmodels, R.

• Experience with scientific computing and tooling — e.g., NumPy, SciPy, R, Matlab, Mathematica, BLAS.

• Self-driven with the capability to efficiently manage projects end-to-end.

Bonus:

• Experience building machine learning models from scratch (e.g., built your own optimiser).

• Excellent knowledge of stochastic processes and related mathematical techniques.

• Experience with modelling credit risk or other topics in mathematical finance (e.g., pricing).

• Implementing solutions in a production environment (e.g., continuous integration).

• Experience with Python. (Note: we mostly work in Python.)

The salary

We expect to pay from £70,000 - £90,000 for this role. But, we’re open-minded, so definitely include your salary goals with your application. We routinely benchmark salaries against market rates, and run quarterly performance and salary reviews. 

The culture

At iwoca, we prioritise a culture of learning, growth, and support, and invest in the professional development of our team members. We value thought and skill diversity, and encourage you to explore new areas of interest to help us innovate and improve our products and services.

The offices

We put a lot of effort into making iwoca a brilliant place to work:

• Offices in London, Leeds, and Frankfurt with plenty of drinks and snacks

• Events and clubs, like bingo, comedy nights, yoga classes, football, etc.

The benefits

• Medical insurance from Vitality, including discounted gym membership, and a private GP service for you, your partner, and your dependents.

• 25 days’ holiday, an extra day off for your birthday, the option to buy or sell an additional 5 days of annual leave, unlimited unpaid leave, and one-month fully paid sabbatical after 4 years.

• Instant access to emotional and mental health support with our partner, Spill.

• Pension and share options.

• Generous parental leave and a nursery tax benefit scheme to help you save money.

• Paid volunteering day to support your chosen charity.

• Cycle-to-work scheme and electric car scheme.

• Two company retreats a year, we’ve been to France, Italy, Spain and further afield.

And to make sure we all keep learning, we offer:

• A learning and development budget for everyone.

• Company-wide talks with internal and external speakers.

• Access to learning platforms like Treehouse.

Useful links:

• iwoca benefits & policies

• Interview welcome pack