Data Scientist - Repeats

Hybrid in London / Remote within the UK

We’re looking for a Data Scientist

As a Data Scientist in the Repeats team, you will lead data-informed innovation in our lending products. You'll design thoughtful experiments and precisely measure opportunities to shape the future of our customer experience and product offerings.

The company

Fast, flexible finance empowers small businesses to manage their cash flow better and seize opportunities - making their business and the economy stronger. 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 Repeats team is responsible for the lending product strategy and digital user experience of our recurring customers. We own all the product decisions that occur after a customer has taken their first funding. This includes the user journey for repeat customers, the eligibility and documents requirements for repeat applications, the offer terms (such as offered amount or pricing), among other things.

The role

As a Data Scientist joining the Repeats team, your primary focus will be to figure out the best document requirements and offer terms (e.g. pricing, amounts, duration, additional product features) we should be making to our existing customers, to maximise user conversion and value to iwoca. You will look at observational data, identify hypotheses for possible unknown relationships, figure out the commercial relevance of these hypotheses, and design and implement tests to test these.

Strategy and innovation:

• Work closely with the Repeats team lead, and the Tech leads to identify and quantify opportunities within the customer journey, based on past data or modelled assumptions.

• Design experiments to compare the performance of different strategies and evaluate them rigorously to make unbiased decisions.

• Share your findings and modelling with the wider business to impact our strategy. We live and breathe data as a company, so Data Scientists have a key role in the decision-making. 

Ownership and influence:

• Own our monitoring and data pipelines, covering all aspects of existing customers' user journey, and getting us the correct data to make decisions.

• Lead the move away from rule-based policies towards machine learning approaches, to improve predictive accuracy and optimise decision-making.

• Join our community of Analysts/Data Scientists/Statisticians to ensure alignment in methodology across iwoca and discuss best practices or the latest advances.

Responsibility and autonomy:

• Promote analytical rigour within the team, ensuring that our experimental designs are correctly defined and that we evaluate tests without bias.

• Develop an acute understanding of the Repeat customers funnel, knowing what fields to use to understand how customers evolve in our complex environment. 

• Independently build data science solutions and statistical models to solve our business problems, with full responsibility in the solution design.

The projects

The projects will evolve as you grow into the role, and you'll be encouraged to find new ways to add value. Here's an overview of example projects:

• Refine our affordability strategy. Being able to lend more without increasing our losses has a direct impact on iwoca’s profitability. Using data from previous experiments, you will be able to evaluate the performance of our current strategy, identify some improvements, and design further experiments to keep optimising this key aspect of our lending strategy.

• Improve our docs requirements. The credit risk team is developing several models to make credit decisions, based on different levels of documents we require. One project will be to optimise the routing of customers between these different models and understand what documents to ask for each repeat customer. You will design tests to measure the effect of the different strategies and create observations you will later use to train a model predicting the best option.

The requirements

Essential:

• Ability to dive deep into the business context and translate data into actionable insights.

• Strong problem-solving skills in probability and statistics.

• Proficiency with data manipulation and modelling tools, e.g. pandas, statsmodels, R.

• Self-driven with the capability to efficiently manage projects end-to-end.

• A PhD in a relevant numerate discipline or previous experience in solving business problems in industry with statistics or machine learning techniques.

Bonus:

• Python experience (we mostly work in Python).

• Experience with experimental design and Bayesian analysis.

• Experience with modelling credit risk or other topics in mathematical finance (e.g., pricing).

The salary

We expect to pay from £70,000 - £90,000 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 brilliant place to work:

• Offices in London, Leeds, and Frankfurt 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:

• iwoca benefits & policies

• Interview welcome pack