Senior Data Scientist - Repeats

at  iwoca

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 ROLE

As a Senior 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 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