Senior Data Scientist, iwoca
£80-100k
+ Equity incentive scheme
Online loans for small businesses
Open for applications
Online loans for small businesses
201-500 employees
Open for applications
£80-100k
+ Equity incentive scheme
201-500 employees
Company mission
To give small business owners a great experience while getting the finance they need.
Role
Who you are
- Ability to dive deep into the business context and translate data into actionable insights
- Strong problem-solving skills in probability and statistics
- Understanding of experimental design
- Proficiency with data manipulation and modelling tools, e.g. pandas, statsmodels, R
- Self-driven with the capability to efficiently manage projects end-to-end
Desirable
- Python experience (we mostly work in Python)
- Experience with Pandas, NumPy, SciPy, R, Matlab, and/or SQL
- Experience with Bayesian analysis
- Experience using machine learning techniques
- Experience with modelling credit risk or other topics in mathematical finance (e.g., pricing)
- Numerate academic background, e.g. in Engineering, Mathematics, Physics, or similar
What the job involves
- As a Senior Data Scientist in the Repeats team, you will lead data-informed innovation in our lending products
- You'll design thoughtful experiments and precisely measure opportunities to shape the future of our customer experience and product offerings
- Work closely with the Repeats team lead, and the Tech leads to identify opportunities within the customer journey
- Quantify the opportunities based on past data or modelled assumptions to inform decisions regarding our lending strategy
- Design experiments to compare the performance of different strategies and evaluate them rigorously to make unbiased decisions
- Help to automate parts of the user journey
- Own our monitoring and data pipelines, covering all aspects of the user journey and getting us the correct data to make decisions
- Collaborate with other teams to ensure alignment in methodology across iwoca
- Move towards a more modelling approach by applying advanced statistical techniques and machine learning to improve predictive accuracy, optimise decision-making, and better understand customer behaviour
- Promote analytical rigour within the team, ensuring that our experimental designs are correctly defined and that we evaluate tests without bias
- Develop an acute understanding of the Repeat customers funnel, knowing what fields to use to understand how customers evolve in our complex environment
- Independently build data science solutions to iwoca's business problems and be on a trajectory with increasing responsibility in solution design
- The projects:
- Improve our affordability strategy: Being able to lend more without increasing our losses has a direct impact on iwoca’s profitability
- Using data from previous experiments, you will be able to evaluate the performance of our current strategy, identify some improvements, and design further experiments to keep optimising this key aspect of our lending strategy
- Improve our monitoring: Having the right data to make decisions is key
- You will work on improving an existing internal Python tool to explore Repeat customers’ performance, which will unlock key views to further optimise our offer terms
- Routing of customers: The credit risk team is developing several models to make credit decisions, based on different levels of documents we require
- One project will be to optimise the routing of customers between these different models and understand what documents to ask for each repeat customer
- You will design tests to measure the effect of the different strategies and create a data set you will later use to train a model predicting the best option
Salary benchmarks
Our take
UK SME's are the backbone of a complex economy that is constantly changing, so the need for fast and responsive access to finance is becoming more and more important to ensure their success and growth. iwoca allows SMEs access to business loans in less than a minute, with its API and business marketplace partnerships.
With offerings like iwoca's, gone are the days where waiting up to eight weeks for a loan decision was viable. Its simplified business loans of £1,000 - £500,000 come with no fees attached, and applying online takes no more than five minutes. The ready availability of iwoca loans gives business owners a level of certainty, so that they can make instant decisions to help their business grow.
iwoca has made a number of partnerships with other players in the business finance space, including an impressive industry-first invoice checkout integration with QuickBooks. Funding raised by the company, which is now operating at net profitability, will enable it to meet a recent surge in demand for corporate loans. The company has made several billion in funding available to over 100,000 businesses since launching, positioning itself as a leading European fintech.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Some candidates hear
back within 2 weeks
33% female employees
-2% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Employee endorsements
Opportunities to learn
"Great opportunities available to learn from both individuals through shadowing, and teams through presentations and even secondment opportunities -..."
Funding (last 2 of 7 rounds)
Aug 2019
$13.2m
GRANT
Feb 2019
$26.3m
SERIES D
Total funding: $95.4m
Company benefits
- Flexible working across all teams.
- Twice a year we rent houses in places like Sicily and the French Alps where each team can work together for a week poolside.
- Share options after six months.
- Comprehensive health insurance and cash plans.
- Gym discounts and weekly yoga classes.
- Each floor of iwoca HQ has a fully stocked fridge for breakfast.
- Enhanced maternity and paternity leave for new parents plus a nursery benefit.
- Unlimited unpaid leave.
- The time and budget to invest in your professional development.
Company values
- Motivated: Going to work shouldn't feel like a slog, so we want everyone in the team to personally care about what they're working on. We stay motivated by celebrating our wins, learning from our mistakes, and always looking for new gaps to step into.
- Smart: At iwoca being smart isn't about what you know, it's about how you think. Smart thinking means looking at each problem by asking ‘why’ first, then figuring out ‘how’.
- Humble: We know all ideas are flawed, all code has bugs, and everyone makes mistakes - it’s how we learn. For us, being humble means you question yourself first, rather than your team.
- Growth Mindset: We think there's always a better way to solve a problem. So we never let ourselves get comfortable with being good enough.
Company HQ
Fitzrovia, London, UK
Articles
Leadership
Christoph Rieche
(CEO)7 years of experience in finance, most recently as a VP at Goldman Sachs.
James Dear
(Head of Systems & Numbers)Previously a VP at Deutsche Bank. Has a PhD in Physics from King's College London.
People progressing
Joined as a Customer Onboarder, moved into the Broker Team and has most recently been promoted to Partnerships Manager.
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion at iwoca
- We work hard to make iwoca a place where everyone feels welcome, where you can confidently be yourself. We understand that diversity isn't an optional add-on, it's the core ingredient of what makes us great.
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