Lead Data Scientist

In your role as  Lead Data Scientist, you’ll be responsible for the line management of a team of Data Scientists, acting as both a coach and a mentor. You’ll manage complex deliveries of Featurespace machine learning models into customer environments, managing client teams, and helping to accelerate critical work.

You’ll be involved in the improvement of internal processes, both operational and technical, and act as a senior point of knowledge and escalation of data science-related technical questions from the EMEA delivery team.

This role is based out of our Cambridge office and is a hybrid role, so you will ideally be comfortable coming into the office at least twice a week at a minimum. If you’re interested in the role but require more flexibility, please speak to us!

• Developing and nurturing a team of Data Scientists
• Managing team members on projects from the smallest to the very largest customer deployments
• Ensuring that projects are run according to best practice as documented by the Data Science team’s ways of working
• Monitoring the quality of the deliverables output by the Data Science team, ensuring that these are produced to an industry leading standard
• Sharing knowledge of best practice relating to methods for data preparation, data visualisation, feature generation, feature selection and model governance
• Working with customers to understand the opportunities and constraints of their existing data in the context of machine learning and predictive modelling
• Improving team processes to increase team efficiency and quality of output
• Providing input into future data science strategy and product development
• Acting as product owner for critical tools in the data science workflow, ensuring that important functionality is delivered to specification by the responsible engineering team
• Leading discussion with development teams to support and enhance the analytical infrastructure
• Evaluating and improving the analytical results on live systems
• Being an expert of industry data structures and processes
• Develop expertise in the ARIC analytical tool stack and ARIC system architecture

Must haves

• Ph.D. or other postgraduate level qualification with good mathematical background and knowledge of statistics
• Significant commercial experience implementing statistical models and analytical algorithms in business critical systems
• Experience managing a team of highly-talented professionals
• Ability to understand complex systems quickly and explain them simply to other people
• Constructive participation in system architecture/design discussions from an analytical and business impact perspective
• Technical and analytical skills with the ability to pick up new technologies and concepts quickly
• Practical experience of the handling and mining of large, diverse, data sets
• Experience of the modern software dev lifecycle: version control, unit testing, CI/CD
• Problem solving skills (especially in data-centric applications)
• Ability to manage and prioritise personal workload

Great to haves

• Experience leading a talented and high-performing Data Science team
• Subject matter expertise in the banking and payments industry
• Experience leading the deployment of machine learning models into high throughput, real-time prediction contexts
• Experience in model governance, fair credit and fair lending compliance

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.