Head of Data Science, iwoca

• Strategic leadership: You have experience setting data science strategy and aligning work with commercial goals
• You can translate technical modelling for senior stakeholders, make assumptions explicit, and shape the decisions that follow
• Production experience: You have managed the full lifecycle of models in production – deploying, monitoring, and retiring them. You are comfortable coordinating chains of model dependencies across different teams
• Commercial acumen: You understand how modelling supports business decisions and know when to make trade-offs between depth, delivery time, and value
• Team development: You have a track record of hiring and developing data scientists, and establishing consistent standards for planning, peer review, and methodology
• Technical background: You have a background in probability, statistics, or a related quantitative field such as mathematics or physics and can evaluate analytical work for conceptual soundness

Desirable

• You’ll lead multiple data science teams whose work guides decision-making across lending, product, operations, and strategy
• You’ll shape how we work, ensuring that analytical insight directly influences the choices that matter most at iwoca
• Iwoca’s data scientists build probabilistic and statistical models that make lending decisions in real time, support forecasting and shape commercial strategy
• Their work is deployed in production code and makes real-time lending decisions; it’s more than exploratory analysis. Successfully leading iwoca’s data science teams will require close collaboration with engineering, product, and commercial teams
• As the Head of Data Science, you’ll lead a group that focuses on rigorous, interpretable, and commercially useful modelling that is deployed, monitored, and maintained in production
• You’ll set direction, shape team structure, and ensure the function’s work is grounded in commercial context and used by decision-makers across iwoca
• The group has approximately 25 data scientists, with most working in a central team and some smaller groups aligned to specific products or domains
• You’ll report to one of iwoca’s co-founders, who is also a data scientist
• You’ll work with the team leads and senior data scientists who coordinate day-to-day work
• You’ll help them plan, sequence, and review projects and maintain consistent standards of reasoning, communication, and methodology. You’ll help the teams decide where and how to apply their efforts – identifying where modelling adds value and where a lighter heuristic approach could be more effective
• You’ll oversee hiring and development, ensuring assessment, progression, and knowledge-sharing are fair, structured, and suited to a growing multi-team environment
• You’ll shape how data science is applied at scale — how uncertainty is communicated, how analytical support is allocated, and how the function directs its effort to the highest-value work
• You’ll coordinate with Engineering, Product, and Operations teams so that projects are properly scoped, resourced, and aligned with wider priorities
• You’ll represent the function in discussions that shape lending, risk, and product decisions by explaining assumptions, highlighting risks, and helping senior stakeholders act on analytical insight