Data Scientist - New Applications

iwoca – Data Scientist – New Applications Team

Hybrid in London, United Kingdom

Company overview

iwoca builds a world where every small business has the power to thrive. Since 2012, we revolutionise how businesses access finance, turning a lengthy, frustrating process into a fast, flexible, and effective funding solution.

Role responsibilities

• Design, implement and review experiments that test the impact of giving instant decisions to different customer segments.
• Collaborate with team lead and other teams to develop an optimised strategy for deciding which documents to request from customers, building, implementing and maintaining predictive models.
• Experiment with integrating an LLM chat assistant into the sign‑up journey, optimising for conversion and data quality.
• Improve and maintain time series models that predict loan issuance numbers and other financial metrics.
• Champion analytical rigour within the team, ensuring experimental designs are correctly defined, models are optimised for impact and results are evaluated rigorously and without bias.
• Mentor and guide data and product analysts on the team.

Required qualifications – Essential

• Strong problem‑solving skills in probability and statistics, ideally from a quantitative background (e.g., Mathematics, Physics, Statistics or similar fields).
• Ability to understand business context and translate data into actionable insights that guide decisions.
• Understanding of experimental design.
• Proficiency with data manipulation and modelling tools, e.g. pandas, statsmodels, R.
• Ability to take ownership of tasks and drive projects forward, developing towards end‑to‑end responsibility.
• Clear written and verbal communication, adapting technical detail to suit different audiences.

Bonus qualifications

• Proficiency in Python, our primary programming language.
• Machine learning model development and evaluation experience.
• Experience with SQL and business intelligence tools such as Looker.
• Understanding of Bayesian statistics.
• Experience building or maintaining data pipelines. Snowflake/dbt experience is particularly valuable.
• Experience using LLM APIs in a production environment.

Compensation

£70,000 – £90,000. Include salary goals with your application.

Benefits & culture

• Flexible working hours.
• Medical insurance from Vitality, including discounted gym membership.
• A private GP service for you, your partner and your dependents.
• 25 days’ holiday per year, 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.
• A learning and development budget for everyone.
• Company‑wide talks with internal and external speakers.
• Access to learning platforms like Treehouse.

Location & travel

Hybrid in London, United Kingdom. Offices in London, Leeds, Berlin and Frankfurt.

Application & hiring

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