Machine Learning Engineering Manager - Payments & Lending

We strongly encourage applications from people of colour, the LGBTQ+ community, people with disabilities, neurodivergent people, parents, carers, and people from lower socio-economic backgrounds.

If there’s anything we can do to accommodate your specific situation, please let us know.

About Cleo

Most people come to Cleo to do work that matters. Every day, we empower people to build a life beyond their next paycheck, building a beloved AI that enables you to forge your own path toward financial well-being.

Backed by some of the most well-known investors in tech, we’ve reached millions of people to support them throughout their financial lives, from their first paycheck to their first home and beyond. We're hitting headlines too. Recently, Forbes named us as one of their Next Billion Dollar Startups, and we were crowned the 'Hottest Tech Scaleup' at the Europas.

Follow us on LinkedIn to keep up to date with new product features and insights from the team.

The team 

You’ll join the existing data science function here at Cleo; a thoughtful and collaborative team of dedicated data scientists, ML engineers, and analysts with significant industry experience that is at the heart of everything we do at Cleo. You’ll build and deploy production models that developers will feed directly into the product.

This position is essential in the expansion of both product and business. We are highly data driven, whether that be understanding natural language, deriving insights from financial data, or determining which financial product is best suited to a user. We have interesting problems to solve on an ever-increasing scale

You’ll be working on a hugely impactful workstream, focused on the decisioning process that underpins our Cash Advance product. You’ll be working on business critical projects that influence our lending policies and impact the users that utilise this feature. The team focuses on understanding user’s cashflow, including payment data and risk profiles - this data is then modelled to work out credit risk for each user. 

Check out this blog on how data science makes Cleo, Cleo. 

What you’ll be doing

• Understanding core problems faced by our Payments & Lending team and leading the team to overcome them - this could include understanding user’s solvency, customer segmentation, retention, payment processing and more 
• Finding opportunities for model and product improvements in Cleo's extensive datasets of transactions, bank balances, and customer behaviour.
• Impacting Cleo’s bottom line through improving our lending eligibility and decisioning systems
• You’ll be responsible for people management of the data scientists & ML engineers in your squads, coaching and developing them to deliver on the roadmap. 
• You’ll build out the headcount plan and will be responsible for all hiring and team development within your area to support our growth.

If you want to hear more from the Data Science team, check out Laurence's blog post. 

About you

• Extensive experience building and deploying Machine Learning models to production
• Experience managing and developing high performing teams of data scientists and ML engineers
• A proven track record of measuring business and user impact with techniques such as A/B testing
• Ability to write production quality code in Python and SQL and a willingness to be somewhat hands on
• A strong ability to communicate findings to non-technical stakeholders in a concise and engaging manner.
• Habits of keeping abreast of the latest research and experimenting productively with new technologies.
• Experience proactively influencing the ML roadmap, driving new ideas with a bias for impact

Nice to haves

• Experience with containers and container orchestration: Kubernetes, Docker, and/or Mesos, including lifecycle management of containers
• Experience working with AWS technologies such as EC2, S3, Sagemaker
• Strong domain knowledge in the credit risk and/or payments space

What do you get for all your hard work?

• Salary banding can be seen here. You'll also have equity options. You can view our progression framework and salary bandings here: https://cleo-ai.progressionapp.com/teams/data-hytlm2bwmux2 This role will be at the DS4-DS5 banding.
• Work at one of the fastest growing tech startups, backed by top VC firms, Balderton & EQT Ventures
• Cleo is a culture of stepping up. We want, and expect you to grow and develop. That means trying new things, leading others, challenging the status quo and owning your impact. You’ll have our support in everything you do. But more importantly, you’ll have our trust.
• We treat you as humans first, employees second. Because we can’t fight for the world’s financial health, if we’re not healthy ourselves. This means the usual perks but it also means flexibility. We take pride in being a flexible workplace that trusts our Cleople to deliver their best work, giving you the autonomy to structure your day around morning drop-offs to school or daily dog walks.
• Other benefits include; 
  • Generous pay increases for high performers and for high-growth team members
  • Equity top ups for team members getting promoted
• Check out our new benefits package here: https://web.meetcleo.com/blog/big-benefits-energy-the-latest-cleo-employee-benefits
• 25 days annual leave a year + public holidays (+ an additional day for every year you spend at Cleo)
• 6% employer-matched pension in the UK
• Performance reviews every 8 months,
• Private Medical Insurance via Vitality, dental cover, and life assurance
• Enhanced parental leave
• 1 month paid sabbatical after 4 years at Cleo
• Regular socials and activities, online and in-person
• We'll pay for your OpenAI subscription
• Online mental health support via Spill
• And many more!

UK App access: The Cleo app is no longer downloadable in the UK (but only until next year). If you’re an existing user, you’ll still have access to the app. But some features won’t be available (just for a little while). Why? 99% of our users are based in the US – where financial health is often overlooked. We’ve decided to shift our focus to where we can provide the most value and make the greatest impact for users who need it most. Then we’ll be able to apply what we learn to better support our UK users in the future. Check out this page for more information.