Data Scientist - Credit Risk Modelling

Hybrid in London

We’re looking for a Data Scientist

Our credit models are central to our lending strategy at iwoca. They are already highly developed for our lending today, but we want to go further tomorrow. As a Data Scientist in our team, you will work directly on advancing these models, possibly by incorporating techniques from the statistics and machine learning literature, in order to support our future lending strategy and product development. This is an opportunity to work at the heart of risk modelling within our business.

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

Our team is a versatile group of data scientists, engineers, and credit risk experts. They manage our lending strategy in terms of credit decisions and loss rates and develop our credit models, right from the R&D stage all the way to deploying models into production. We are a full-stack team, managing our down data processing and deployments, but with substantial collaboration with other tech teams and areas of the business.

The team also owns our customer lifetime value (CLtV) model, another highly tailored mathematical model which is used for optimisation throughout the business.

Our dynamic and autonomous environment emphasises ‘getting things done’ and delivering high quality solutions. You can expect to work closely with stakeholders, delivering solutions iteratively 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 will involve growing and demonstrating your skills in several key areas, including but not limited to:

• Model development.

  • Explore and integrate innovative modelling methods into our training pipeline to enhance the predictive power and flexibility of our models.

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

  • Clearly communicate and explain any model changes to the business, ensuring transparency and fostering trust in the model's predictions.

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

• Model-driven insights.

  • Utilise our modelling and analytics tools (and introduce new ones where appropriate) to uncover insights, such as customer behaviour patterns, features predictive of lending outcomes, or the efficacy of new modelling techniques.

  • Effectively communicate these insights with the broader business to drive value by informing our lending strategy.

• Project ownership and autonomy.

  • Independently develop data science solutions to address iwoca's challenges in credit risk and customer lifetime value modelling, 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:

• Ability to effectively communicate with stakeholders and downstream users of the model, and to maintain up-to-date and reliable documentation.

• Strong problem-solving skills in probability and statistics

• Experience developing code collaboratively and implementing solutions in a production environment.

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

• Experience with scientific computing and tooling, e.g., NumPy, SciPy, Matlab, etc.

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

• Experience working on research projects, particularly those involving mathematical, statistical, or analytical modelling.

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

• Experience with Python or ability to pick this up quickly. (Note: we mostly work in Python.)

Bonus:

• Excellent knowledge of stochastic processes and related mathematical techniques.

• Knowledge of financial concepts (e.g. calculations with deterministic cash flows).

The salary

We expect to pay from £60,000 - £80,000 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 great place to work:

• Offices in London, Leeds, Frankfurt, and Berlin 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. 

• A private GP service (separate from Vitality) 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 five days of annual leave, and unlimited unpaid leave. 

• A one-month, fully paid sabbatical after four years.

• Instant access to external counselling and therapy sessions for team members that need emotional or mental health support.

• 3% pension contributions on total earnings.

• An employee equity incentive scheme. 

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

• Electric car scheme and cycle to work 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:

• See iwoca benefits & policies for detail and some additional benefits.

• See interview welcome pack to learn more about the process.