Senior Data Scientist - Partnerships Strategy

Hybrid in London, or Remote within UK

We’re looking for a Data Scientist to join our Partnerships Strategy team

Our partnerships bring us more than half of iwoca’s new customers and power iwoca’s growth. 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 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 function

iwoca's Data Scientists specialise in Supervised Machine Learning, Statistical Inference and Exploratory Statistics, focusing on tabular and time series data. Our work emphasises quantitative predictions through the analysis of conditional probabilities and expectations, using medium-sized datasets.

The team

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.

The role

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. Projects we are currently working on include:

• 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? 

The requirements

Essential:

• 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

Bonus:

• 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).

The salary

We expect to pay from £90,000 - £120,000 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.