Senior Data Scientist, iwoca
Partnerships Strategy
£90-120k
+ Employee equity incentive scheme.
Online loans for small businesses
Job no longer available
Online loans for small businesses
201-500 employees
Job no longer available
£90-120k
+ Employee equity incentive scheme.
201-500 employees
Company mission
To fund one million small businesses.
Role
Who you are
- Strong problem-solving skills in probability and statistics, ideally from a quantitative background (e.g., Engineering, Mathematics, Physics, or similar fields)
- 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-starter with ability to work autonomously and efficiently manage projects end-to-end
- Excellent communication skills, with the ability to adjust your communication style and technical detail based on the audience
- Expert understanding of Bayesian statistics, and ideally should be comfortable with hierarchical Bayesian models
Desirable
- Experience building machine learning models from scratch (e.g. creating custom optimisers)
- Advanced knowledge of stochastic processes and related mathematical techniques
- Experience with Python (our primary programming language)
- Knowledge of financial concepts (e.g. calculations with deterministic cash flows)
What the job involves
- The partnerships strategy team provides guidance and support to the commercial teams through data and test driven analyses and recommendations
- As a data scientist in the team, you’ll run split tests, build predictive models, and optimise partner engagement, pricing, and commission strategies
- Your work will directly shape how we strengthen partner relationships, maximise profit, and improve customer acquisition efficiency
- The Partnership Strategy team is a small, interdisciplinary group of five, including commercial strategy, business analysis, and data science
- They work closely with commercial teams, translating business decisions into quantitative problems and delivering insights in a clear, actionable way
- As the senior data scientist in Partnerships Strategy, you will be responsible for planning, carrying out, and explaining various split tests as well as developing models to predict partner and customer behaviour
- Pricing strategy test: Does offering extremely low-priced loans to some high-quality customers encourage partners to send us more applications or sell more loans overall?
- Broker Relationship Manager (BRM) test: How much value is there in building and maintaining strong relationships with brokers through BRMs? How much time is needed to provide this service to a broker of a given size, and how many staff members do we need for this? Can we quantify what relationship-building activities, such as business lunches, Christmas hampers, or catch-up calls, have the greatest impact for different brokers?
- Broker Account Manager (BAM) task management test: What tasks, such as reminding brokers to submit documents, or draw down funds, should BAMs be doing? How should they be doing them, e.g. through emailing or through phone calls? How many staff members should we invest in this?
- Broker personality test: How do broker's operations, customer base, and preferences differ from one another? Is there any benefit in offering different types of treatments or offers to different brokers? If so, how can we determine these?
Salary benchmarks
Our take
UK SMEs 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 and offer more to larger SMB businesses. And 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
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
$13.3m
GRANT
Feb 2019
$26.6m
SERIES D
Total funding: $96.6m
Company benefits
- Work where you work best: Twice a year we rent houses in places like Sicily and the French Alps where each team can work together for a week poolside. We champion flexible working in all our teams
- Invest in iwoca: We want people to be invested in iwoca's success so after six months you'll be awarded share options
- Keep yourself healthy: We offer comprehensive health insurance and cash plans. You'll also get gym discounts and we host yoga classes in the office every week
- Start (and end) your day right: Each floor of iwoca HQ has a fully stocked fridge for breakfast and every Friday we unwind with beers and wine
- Life-work balance: We know your life outside of work comes first. We offer enhanced maternity and paternity leave for new parents plus a nursery benefit. We also have unlimited unpaid leave
- Learning and development: Whether you want to learn to code, experiment with motion design, or beat cognitive biases, you'll have 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
(Co-Founder & CEO)Previously spent 7 years at Goldman Sachs as a Vice President before co-founding iwoca in 2011.
Joost Versteeg
(CMO)Joost initially joined iwoca in 2017 as an Intern. Since then, they have held a number of roles, from Growth Analyst to Head of Commercial Strategy and became CMO in 2024.
People progressing
Serita joined as a Customer Onboarder, before moving into the Broker Team. Most recently they have been promoted to Partnership Manager.
Leo joined in 2018 as a Client Onboarder. Since then, they have worked in a number of roles and now serve as the Product Manager.
Jenny originally joined the Client Onboarding team and now leads the Customer Success department for the German business.
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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