Head of Analytics & Data Science, Spain and Ibero-America

As our Head of Analytics & Data Science for the Ibero-America Analytics team, you will be a skilled and influential leader. The team produces industry leading machine learning models and decision systems whose actions protect hundreds of millions of cardholders and accountholders from fraud and financial crime every day across Spain and Ibero-America.  

You’ll lead an energetic group that thrive on achieving great customer outcomes every day. They are empowered to produce the best results for our customers and motivated by the opportunity to level up the fraud detection systems in the region.  

As Featurespace continues to grow worldwide, this position will see you significantly grow the high-performing Ibero-Americas Analytics team during an exciting period of expansion in the region. Away from leading the team and managing customer delivery work, you’ll guide new commercial opportunities towards signature and contribute valuable insight towards the next generation of our fraud and financial crime prevention products.  

You will have built then deployed machine-learning models and complex data driven systems in high pressure, business-critical contexts so are well versed in the software engineering and ML Ops practices required to achieve this at scale. Beyond the technology, we’re looking for someone who is comfortable consulting directly with customers to shape their problems into defined solutions and can gracefully lead and manage a team of managers and individuals. 

The role can be based remotely in Spain, with regular travel to our regional office in Madrid.  This role requires a high degree of proficiency in both Spanish and English and we would invite you to submit your application in English.

It can be hard to know accurately what you’ll be doing day to day from a job description that’s why we’re telling you exactly what your team does! 

In a nutshell, we provide our customers with an analytics execution platform which responds in real-time to stop transaction and payment fraud in its tracks. The platform also has an important second function; it enables their fraud and risk operations teams to review high risk and suspicious activities identified by their analytics, orchestrate communication with their account and cardholders as well as reporting on the effectiveness of those analytics and operations.  

There are three key tasks for the Ibero-America Analytics team:  

1. System integration: No analytics execution platform is better than its data integration or customer specific configuration! Our Analytics team work closely with the customer during the system integration to ensure high-quality data is integrated and that the ARIC system is correctly configured to meet the fraud detection demands on the customer.  
2. Analytics and risk strategy consultancy: No analytics execution platform supplied by high-quality, clean data is better than the specific analytics that it runs! Our team work extremely closely with customer fraud and risk strategy teams to ensure that the analytics that our systems run produce industry-leading fraud detection outcomes. We do this by supporting and teaching our customers to use our system effectively but also lending our experience from across the industry and querying data sent to the platform to further optimise the analytics.
3. Data science: Featurespace’s machine learning models are one of the most attractive propositions to our customers! The final piece in the triad of team activities is the configuration of machine learning models from the rich datasets our customers possess.  

As our  Head of Analytics for Ibero America, you will support your team through achieving outstanding results on behalf of our customers by: 

• Managing the quality of output of the Analytics team in Ibero Americas   
• Developing and coaching the team to have a culture of high performance, especially around quality of customer relationships, and constant and consistent experimentation to drive improvement 
• Creating a regional team structure with good processes for all the major team functions where appropriate collaborating within the global Analytics function to establish these: recruitment, on-boarding, equipment requisition, learning and development, prioritisation, knowledge sharing 
• Providing the team a broader view of the business than just Analytics, understanding the perspective of customers and other departments and being able to influence external organisations 

Must haves

• Strong, clear, concise written and verbal communication skills in both Spanish and English
• Experience of successfully leading a talented and high-performing Analytics or Data Science team, with a passion for managing people and solving organizational challenges
• A willingness to share expertise to help grow the people the people around you
• Commitment to satisfying customer’s requirements by producing class leading analytics
• Experience leading the deployment of machine learning models into high throughput, real-time prediction contexts
• Extensive commercial experience implementing statistical models and analytical algorithms in software
• Ability to lead system architecture/design discussions from an analytical and business impact perspective

Great to haves

• Subject matter expertise in the banking and payments industry
• A track record in developing future leaders from within your organisation
• Experience managing geographically disperse or remote teams
• Ph.D. or other postgraduate level qualification with good mathematical background and knowledge of statistics 

Here at Featurespace we are committed to being a place of equality, inclusion and respect to provide a safe environment for you to bring your authentic self to work. We know that we gain as much strength from our differences as we do our similarities. We value diversity and are dedicated to listening and learning from each other to build and maintain a positive and productive culture. We appreciate this will be an ever-evolving focus for the business to ensure everyone feels supported and has a sense of belonging.