Data Scientist (Fraud)

Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! Our vision is fast technology, fair service, and honest values. All at the tap of a phone, all the time.

We are about giving customers a new way to spend, save and manage their money while taking better care of the planet which has seen us become a multi-award winning bank that now employs over 2800 across five offices in London, Cardiff, Dublin, Southampton, and Manchester. Our journey started in 2014, and since then we have surpassed 3.5 million accounts (and four account types!) with 350,000 business customers. We are a fully licensed UK bank but at the heart, we are a tech first company, enabling our platform to deliver brilliant products.

Our technologists are at the very heart of Starling and enjoy working in a fast-paced environment that is all about building things, creating new stuff, and disruptive technology that keeps us on the cutting edge of fintech. We operate a flat structure to empower you to make decisions regardless of what your primary responsibilities may be, innovation and collaboration will be at the core of everything you do. Help is never far away in our open culture, you will find support in your team and from across the business, we are in this together!

The way to thrive and shine within Starling is to be a self-driven individual and be able to take full ownership of everything around you: From building things, designing, discovering, to sharing knowledge with your colleagues and making sure all processes are efficient and productive to deliver the best possible results for our customers. Our purpose is underpinned by five Starling values: Listen, Keep It Simple, Do The Right Thing, Own It, and Aim For Greatness.

Hybrid Working

We have a Hybrid approach to working here at Starling - our preference is that you're located within a commutable distance of one of our offices so that we're able to interact and collaborate in person. In Technology, we're asking that you attend the office a minimum of 1 day per week.

Our Data Environment

Our Data teams are excited about the value of data within the business, powers our product decisions to improve things for our customers and enhance effective and agile decision making, regardless of what their primary tech stack may be. Hear from the team in our latest blogs or our case studies with Women in Tech.

We are looking for talented data professionals at all levels to join the team. We value people being engaged and caring about customers, caring about the code they write and the contribution they make to Starling. People with a broad ability to apply themselves to a multitude of problems and challenges, who can work across teams do great things here at Starling, to continue changing banking for good.

Ways of Working:

• We value autonomy - you’ll be trusted to manage your own projects, drive modelling initiatives, and take ideas from concept to production
• You’ll be encouraged to propose new approaches and explore creative ways to detect and prevent fraud
• We debate and critique our ideas in a healthy, supportive team
• You’ll have the chance to shape both models and how we think about fraud detection as a wider team

Responsibilities:

• You will be part of a team that builds, evaluates and deploys machine learning models to improve and automate decision making
• Collaborate with technical and non-technical teams to understand problems, explore data, and develop effective fraud prevention tools and solutions
• Design and maintain robust feature engineering pipelines for modelling, working closely with analytics engineering teams
• Contribute to the development of end-to-end machine learning workflows and help embed models into production systems
• Analyse transaction and behavioural data to identify trends, anomalies, and fraud patterns

Requirements

• Industry experience in data science or machine learning models, ideally in fraud, financial crime, or a related domain
• Experience working with large-scale, high-dimensional, and heavily imbalanced datasets
• Excellent skills in Python and SQL
• Solid understanding of classification algorithms such as gradient boosting decision trees, including pros and cons of different model architectures
• Strong feature engineering skills and experience in transforming raw data into useful model inputs
• Effective communication skills and able to explain complex findings clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Demonstrable experience deploying machine learning solutions in a production environment, and familiarity with version controls systems (e.g. Git)

Desirables:

• Experience with cloud-based ML infrastructure, particularly GCP (Vertex AI, BigQuery), or equivalent (e.g. AWS, Azure)
• Exposure to orchestration tools such as Kubeflow pipelines or Airflow
• Familiarity with DBT or similar tools for modelling data in data warehouses
• Desire to build interpretable and explainable ML models (using techniques such as SHAP)
• Desire to quantify the level of fairness and bias machine learning models
• Enthusiasm for improving fraud detection systems and a proactive, problem-solving mindset

Interview process

Interviewing is a two way process and we want you to have the time and opportunity to get to know us, as much as we are getting to know you! Our interviews are conversational and we want to get the best from you, so come with questions and be curious. In general you can expect the below, following a chat with one of our Talent Team:

• Stage 1 - 45 mins with one of the team
• Stage 2 - Take home challenge
• Stage 3 - 60 mins technical interview with two team members
• Stage 3 - 45 min final with an executive and a member of the people team

Benefits

• 33 days holiday (including public holidays, which you can take when it works best for you)
• An extra day’s holiday for your birthday
• Annual leave is increased with length of service, and you can choose to buy or sell up to five extra days off
• 16 hours paid volunteering time a year
• Salary sacrifice, company enhanced pension scheme
• Life insurance at 4x your salary & group income protection
• Private Medical Insurance with VitalityHealth including mental health support and cancer care. Partner benefits include discounts with Waitrose, Mr&Mrs Smith and Peloton
• Generous family-friendly policies
• Incentives refer a friend scheme
• Perkbox membership giving access to retail discounts, a wellness platform for physical and mental health, and weekly free and boosted perks
• Access to initiatives like Cycle to Work, Salary Sacrificed Gym partnerships and Electric Vehicle (EV) leasing

About us

You may be put off applying for a role because you don't tick every box. Forget that! While we can’t accommodate every flexible working request, we're always open to discussion. So, if you're excited about working with us, but aren’t sure if you're 100% there yet, get in touch anyway. We’re on a mission to radically reshape banking – and that starts with our brilliant team. Whatever came before, we’re proud to bring together people of all backgrounds and experiences who love working together to solve problems.

Starling Bank is an equal opportunity employer, and we’re proud of our ongoing efforts to foster diversity & inclusion in the workplace. Individuals seeking employment at Starling Bank are considered without regard to race, religion, national origin, age, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, marital status, medical condition, ancestry, physical or mental disability, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. When you provide us with this information, you are doing so at your own consent, with full knowledge that we will process this personal data in accordance with our Privacy Notice.

By submitting your application, you agree that Starling Bank may collect your personal data for recruiting and related purposes. Our Privacy Notice explains what personal information we may process, where we may process your personal information, its purposes for processing your personal information, and the rights you can exercise over our use of your personal information.