Data Scientist

Job Title: Data Scientist

Location: London / Leicester / Bexhill

Welcome to Hastings Direct

We’re a digital insurance provider with a clear strategy to become the best and biggest player in the UK market. As a company, we’ve made huge investments in our technology, pricing, data and analytics capabilities over the past few years, along with nurturing our 4Cs culture and substantial investment in our people. And as a Finance team, we're doing exactly the same – building a market leading finance technology platform, investing in our team and our approach to leadership development, with a real focus on commercially adding value to the business. 

The fact you’re now reading this job advert means we’ve tempted you to find out more about #lifeatHD. If you like what you see, we hope you'll consider joining our team.  

We have high standards and understand some people may not apply for jobs unless they feel they tick every box. If you’re excited about joining us and think you have some of what we are looking for, even if you’re not 100% sure, we would love to hear from you.

Role overview  

Retail Pricing are responsible for developing and delivering Hastings’ street pricing strategy, driving commercial performance whilst ensuring fair customer outcomes. The team of pricing, data science and analytics experts set prices that maximise the value generated through customer acquisition and retention by using advanced machine learning, statistical and optimisation techniques to model both customer behaviour and the dynamic, highly competitive UK price comparison market Hastings operates in.

Data Scientists are critical members of that team, working with extensive, diverse datasets to build predictive models and deploy those to enhance our price optimisation algorithms.

Job details

• Querying our data warehouses to extract modelling data, create new features and analyse the performance of price optimisations and tests

• Building machine learning and statistical models to predict the market and customer behaviour, deploying them to enhance our pricing

•  Using and developing our pricing algorithm to deliver new price optimisations and tests

To achieve this you will need to:

• Be a fast learner to understand our business, its value drivers and the data it generates

• Have a customer focus to both spot profit opportunities and do the right thing

• Think creatively to master and combine machine learning and statistical approaches

• Love sharing your ideas and storytelling to engage and enthuse our stakeholders

• Document your work and build pipelines to automate it

Essential skills/experience:  

• Degree (Masters preferred) in a numerical discipline (e.g. mathematics, sciences, engineering, computing)

• SQL and experience working with large or complex datasets

• R/Python/Matlab or coding statistical methods in other languages

• Building classification and/or regression models (e.g. GLMs)

• Knowledge of supervised or unsupervised machine learning techniques

Desirable

• experience working in an analytical, modelling or data science role

• Insurance industry/actuarial experience

• Hyper-parameter tuning of machine learning models

• Practicalities of deploying models into production environments (e.g. XML, POJO, PMML)

• Knowledge of version control and automation tools (e.g. GIT, Jenkins)

The interview process:

Our interview process involves the below: 

• Recruiter screening call 

• 1st stage interview with hiring leader

• 2nd Technical interview Panel format

As a Disability Confident employer, we’re committed to ensuring our recruitment processes are fully inclusive – what this means to you is if you’re applying for a job with us, you’ll have fair access to support and adjustments throughout your recruitment journey. We also welcome applications through the Disability Confident Scheme (DCS).For more information on the DCS, please visit our inclusive business page on our careers website

Benefits: In addition to a competitive salary you will also receive…

Flexible working – we champion a flexible hybrid working approach – please speak to your recruiter to discuss in more detail

Competitive bonus scheme - all colleagues are eligible for our annual 4Cs performance bonus

Financial wellbeing – as well as providing you with 4x your salary with our life assurance cover, income protection at no extra cost, and matched pension contributions up to 10%, we are proud to provide you with an award winning package which includes – discounts, cashback, free independent mortgage advice and free access to financial wellbeing support

Mental wellbeing programme – we have the thrive mental health app, our colleague assistance programme available 24/7, our own in-house mental health first aiders, support groups and a dedicated team to make sure we are covering your needs

There's more! – 25 days annual leave + bank holidays, with the option to buy or sell one of your  weeks, access to our health care cash back plans, dental plans, discounted health assessments, Cycle to work and tech schemes, discounted and free onsite facilities, social events throughout the year and much more ….

Join us and you’ll find a different way of doing things. We call it the 4Cs. We focus on getting it right for our colleagues, customers, company and community. As one of our colleagues, you’ll be helping to drive our growth, so in return, we’ll give you all the support, training and development you need. Our 4Cs principles are simple: we believe by creating the right culture for our colleagues and giving them the right tools to do their job, we’ll deliver good outcomes for every customer, helping us to grow the company profitably and sustainably and allowing us to invest in the communities we serve.

At Hastings Direct, we’re committed to creating an inclusive environment where everyone has the opportunity to succeed. If you require any reasonable adjustments during the recruitment process, we encourage you to be open with us. Our recruitment team is here to provide the support you need to ensure a fair and accessible experience for all.

Job posting end date: