Lead Data Scientist

Faculty

WHY FACULTY? We established Faculty in 2014 because we thought that AI would be the most important technology of our time. Since then, we’ve worked with over 350 global customers to transform their performance through human-centric AI. You can read about our real-world impact here. We don’t chase hype cycles. We innovate, build and deploy responsible AI which moves the needle - and we know a thing or two about doing it well. We bring an unparalleled depth of technical, product and delivery expertise to our clients who span government, finance, retail, energy, life sciences and defence. Our business, and reputation, is growing fast and we’re always on the lookout for individuals who share our intellectual curiosity and desire to build a positive legacy through technology. AI is an epoch-defining technology, join a company where you’ll be empowered to envision its most powerful applications, and to make them happen. ABOUT THE TEAM In our Professional and Financial Services Business unit, we bring everything we have learned in more than a decade of Applied AI, and use it to help our clients navigate a rapidly changing landscape. We develop and embed AI solutions which help financial institutions become more efficient, enhance customer experience, and find the commercial upside in uncertain markets. Within the constraints of a highly regulated industry, we see so much opportunity for impactful innovation and are proud to set the gold-standard for marrying technical excellence with safe deployment. #LI-PRIO ABOUT THE ROLE As a Lead Data Scientist, you'll take on a pivotal, entrepreneurial role, functioning as the technical expert who thrives on complexity and commercial impact. You will be responsible for setting the technical direction and ensuring the high-quality, scalable delivery of our most challenging, high-impact projects. This position combines deep expertise in machine learning with strategic oversight to define project roadmaps, manage technical risk, and architect reliable solutions. Your focus will be on driving innovation, mentoring cross-functional teams, and actively shaping both our technical standards and long-term customer relationships. WHAT YOU'LL BE DOING: * Setting the technical direction for complex, business-critical projects and expertly balancing trade-offs between speed, innovation, and reliability. * Designing and implementing reliable, production-grade technical solutions, ensuring comprehensive documentation of architectures and specifications. * Defining project problems, developing clear roadmaps, and overseeing end-to-end delivery across multi-disciplinary workstreams. * Leading technical scoping and feasibility studies for high-value sales opportunities and strategic customer engagements. * Managing relationships and communications with demanding clients, fostering trust and aligning technical solutions with shared long-term commercial goals. * Driving the adoption of best practices, shared resources, and robust technical processes across the wider Data Science craft. * Mentoring and developing other data scientists and team members, actively contributing to the growth and technical excellence of the organisation. WHO WE'RE LOOKING FOR: * You bring depth of expertise in at least one machine learning domain and strong technical breadth across the entire data science landscape. * You are a skilled technical leader, proficient in mentoring individuals, managing teams (including other managers), and rolling out impactful tools and workflows. * You have proven project management expertise, capable of dividing complex, ill-defined problems into actionable, clearly defined workstreams with timelines you can defend. * You are adept at managing ill-defined, high-risk tasks, consistently delivering innovative and practical outcomes under commercial pressure. * You possess strong customer leadership skills, able to act as a trusted technical advisor and drive long-term strategic relationships with demanding clients. * You excel at cross-functional collaboration, effectively aligning technical strategy with Engineering, Commercial (BD), and Infrastructure teams. * You have experience extending technical oversight to business unit-level initiatives, using your vision to influence and contribute to organisational success. THE INTERVIEW PROCESS 1. Talent Team Screen (30 minutes) 2. Introduction to the team (30 minutes) 3. Take Home Technical Assessment 4. Technical Interview (90 minutes) 5. Commercial Interview (60 minutes) OUR RECRUITMENT ETHOS We aim to grow the best team - not the most similar one. We know that diversity of individuals fosters diversity of thought, and that strengthens our principle of seeking truth. And we know from experience that diverse teams deliver better work, relevant to the world in which we live. We’re united by a deep intellectual curiosity and desire to use our abilities for measurable positive impact. We strongly encourage applications from people of all backgrounds, ethnicities, genders, religions and sexual orientations. Some of our standout benefits: * Unlimited Annual Leave Policy * Private healthcare and dental * Enhanced parental leave * Family-Friendly Flexibility & Flexible working * Sanctus Coaching * Hybrid Working If you don’t feel you meet all the requirements, but are excited by the role and know you bring some key strengths, please don't hesitate in applying as you might be right for this role, or other roles. We are open to conversations about part-time hours.

Carwow

OUR MISSION To become the car-changing destination of choice. By combining technology, media and deep automotive expertise, we've turned how people buy, sell, advertise and lease cars on its head. What started as a simple reviews site is now one of the largest online car-changing destinations in Europe. Last year alone we grew over 50% with nearly £3bn worth of cars bought on site, while £1.8bn of cars were listed for sale through our Sell My Car service. In 2024 we went big and acquired Autovia - creators of AutoExpress and Evo magazines - doubling our audience overnight. Together we now have one of the biggest YouTube channels in the world with almost 10m subscribers and over 1.1 billion annual views, while we sell 1.2 million print copies of our magazines and have an annual web content reach over 350million. And we’re a long way from done! THE ROLE We're looking for a Senior Data Scientist to join our award-winning Data Science team at a pivotal moment. Carwow operates a two-sided marketplace — connecting car buyers and sellers at scale — and data science sits at the heart of how we make that marketplace smarter, faster, and more valuable for everyone in it. In fact, we recently won GenAI initiative of the Year at the British Data Awards. This is a hands-on, high-ownership role working centrally across the business. You'll partner with teams spanning Commercial, Marketing, Product, Finance, Engineering and Operations — developing and deploying ML and AI solutions that drive outcomes across both sides of our marketplace. The problems you'll work on are genuinely varied: pricing models, propensity and demand signals that sharpen marketing spend, personalised recommendations for our web product and CRM, and LLM-powered solutions for operational challenges like document verification. You'll translate ambiguous business problems into structured, production-ready solutions — and you'll be expected to deliver them end-to-end, from first principles through to being deployment-ready and beyond.   WHAT YOU'LL BE DOING * End-to-End ML & AI Delivery: Lead data science initiatives from problem framing through to deployment, monitoring, and iteration — delivering the full production lifecycle. With no dedicated ML engineering function, you'll be responsible for ensuring your solutions are robust, scalable, and performing in the real world long after they ship. * GenAI & LLM Application: Design and build LLM-powered solutions where they create genuine business value — document processing, intelligent search, content understanding, and beyond. Apply them alongside classical ML with clear judgement about where each approach earns its place. * Commercial Impact: Connect your work directly to business outcomes. Whether you're building a model to improve marketing efficiency, a pricing signal to sharpen commercial decisions, or a recommendation engine to increase conversion — you understand the business lever you're pulling and design your solutions accordingly. * Prototyping & Experimentation: Move fast to test ideas before committing to full-scale development. Define rigorous success metrics upfront, validate honestly, and know when to double down and when to walk away. * Cross-Functional Partnership: Work closely with Commercial, Marketing, Product, Finance, Engineering and Operations stakeholders to understand problems deeply before reaching for a solution. Translate findings into clear, actionable narratives for both technical and non-technical audiences. * Standards & Craft: Contribute to shared best practices, documentation, and ways of working that raise the bar for the data science function — and help more junior team members grow alongside you. Drive continued adoption of AI capabilities to drive efficiencies, automation and constantly leverage new capabilities. WHAT YOU'LL NEED Please note: We know that no candidate will be the perfect match for all we've listed in this posting, so we’d encourage you to apply if you feel you're close to the brief but not an exact match. Ideally you’ll have * Commercial Mindset: You think about business impact first. You understand how your models connect to revenue, efficiency, or customer outcomes — and you use that to prioritise, scope, and communicate your work. * Stakeholder Partnership: Proven ability to work with commercial, marketing, and product stakeholders — translating business problems into well-scoped solutions and communicating technical solutions, challenges and outcomes clearly at all levels. * Sound Judgement: You navigate the tooling landscape with clear eyes — knowing when classical ML is right, when GenAI unlocks something new, and when a simpler solution is the more honest answer. Strong instincts for scalability, reliability, and explainability. * [Bonus] Marketplace or Two-Sided Platform Experience: Understanding of supply/demand dynamics and how data science creates leverage in a marketplace context. TEHCNICAL SKILLSET * Proven ML Experience: A strong track record of building, deploying, and maintaining ML models in Python in a production environment — not just notebooks. You've owned models after they ship and know how to keep them healthy. * Full-Lifecycle Delivery (MLOps): Comfortable delivering the end-to-end production lifecycle — model training, versioning, monitoring, and champion/challenger experimentation — without relying on a dedicated ML engineering team to carry that responsibility. * GenAI & LLM Expertise: Hands-on experience building LLM-powered solutions that deliver measurable business value. You understand how to apply, evaluate, and extend these tools — and you're honest about where they fall short. * Technical Depth: Solid experience in a cloud ML environment with software engineering principles — version control, code reviews, unit testing, and familiarity with containerisation. * Quantitative Rigour: Strong foundation in statistical evaluation and experiment design. You can define and defend success metrics, and you know when a model is degrading and what to do about it. * [Bonus] Experience with VertexAI TOOLS & TECHNOLOGIES * Languages: Python, SQL * Data & Transformation: dbt, Snowflake, BigQuery * Visualisation & BI: Looker * Engineering & MLOps: Docker, GitHub * Workflow & Orchestration: Vertex AI Pipelines (GCP), Kubeflow * LLMs & GenAI: Gemini API, Claude API INTERVIEW PROCESS * Step 1: People Team Screening Call (30 min) * Step 2: Hiring Manager Call: Experience (45 min) * Step 3: Technical Task: covering both Modelling & Production with Presentation (60 min + Task) * Step 4: Values Interview (45 min) WHAT’S IN IT FOR YOU * Hybrid working * Competitive salary to fund that dream holiday to Bali * Matched pension contributions for a peaceful retirement * Share options - when we thrive, so do you! * Vitality Private Healthcare, for peace of mind, plus eyecare vouchers * Life Assurance for (even more) peace of mind * Monthly coaching sessions with Spill - our mental wellbeing partner * Enhanced holiday package, plus Bank Holidays * 28 days annual leave * 1 day for your wedding * 1 day off when you move house - because moving is hard enough without work! * For your third year anniversary, get 30 days of annual leave per year * For your tenth year anniversary, get 35 days of annual leave per year * Option to buy 3 extra days of holiday per year * Work from abroad for a month * Inclusive parental, partner and shared parental leave, fertility treatment and pregnancy loss policies * Bubble childcare support and discounted nanny fees for little ones * The latest tech (Macbook or Surface) to power your gif-sending talents * Up to £500/€550 home office allowance for that massage chair you’ve been talking about * Generous learning and development budget to help you master your craft * Regular social events: tech lunches, coffee with the exec sessions, lunch 8 learns, book clubs, social events/anything else you pester us for * Refer a friend, get paid. Repeat for infinite money Diversity and inclusion is an integral part of our culture. We know that diverse teams are strong teams, so we welcome those with alternative identities, backgrounds, and experiences to apply for this position. We make recruiting decisions based on experience, skills and potential, so all our applicants are treated fairly and equally.

iwoca

HEAD OF DATA SCIENCE & AI Hybrid in London, United Kingdom We’re looking for a Head of Data Science & AI You'll lead iwoca's data science function – a group building probabilistic and statistical models that make real-time lending decisions. You'll also be a key part of how iwoca embeds AI across the wider business: setting the pace yourself, and raising capability beyond your direct team. The company Small businesses move fast. Opportunities often don’t wait, and cash flow pressures can appear overnight. To keep going, and growing, SMEs need finance that’s as flexible and responsive as they are. That's why we built iwoca. Our smart technology, data science and five-star customer service ensures business owners can act with the speed, confidence and control they need, exactly when it's needed. We’ve already cleared the way for 100,000 businesses with more than £4 billion in funding. Our passionate team is driven to help even more SMEs succeed, through access to better finance and other services that make running a business easier. Our ultimate mission is to support one million SMEs in their defining moments, creating lasting impact for the communities and economies they drive. The team iwoca's data scientists build probabilistic and statistical models that make lending decisions in real time, support forecasting, and shape commercial strategy. Their work is deployed in production code and has direct commercial consequences – it's more than exploratory analysis. The function is now embedding AI into how that work gets done. Successfully leading it will require close collaboration with engineering, product, and commercial teams. The role As Head of Data Science & AI, you'll shape how a technically sophisticated team works – and influence how the wider business adopts AI. Doing that well requires a deep understanding of the modelling work: where AI genuinely changes the work, where it speeds things up, and where a different approach is better. You'll judge what's actually possible with these tools – and challenge the assumptions when the rationale isn't clear. iwoca's data scientists build probabilistic ML models on credit and commercial data, deployed in production, making real-time lending decisions across lending, product, operations, and strategy. The group has approximately 25 data scientists, split across a central team and smaller groups aligned to specific products or domains. You'll report to one of iwoca's co-founders, who is also a data scientist. * AI enablement and adoption You'll set the standard for how AI is used across the group – establishing practices that make adoption safe and repeatable, and creating the conditions for a technically sophisticated group to advance together. * Strategic direction You'll influence where the group invests its resources – deciding what to model, where AI accelerates the work, and where a lighter approach is more effective. You'll shape commercial and product decisions by making analytical trade-offs legible to senior stakeholders, and work with team leads to plan and prioritise across multiple streams. * People and team You'll develop the people around you – raising capability across the group through clear standards, direct coaching, and a genuine investment in how data scientists grow. You'll spot where the gaps are and help close them. You'll also own hiring, shaping how the group assesses and develops talent as it grows. * Commercial opportunity and coordination You'll spot commercial opportunities across the business – where modelling or AI can change outcomes – and work with Engineering, Product, and Operations teams to act on them. You'll represent the group in discussions that shape lending, risk, and product decisions, explaining assumptions, highlighting risks, and helping senior stakeholders act on analytical insight. The requirements Essential * High AI agency: You actively experiment with AI in your analytical and technical workflows. You use tools like Claude Code, Codex, or similar to build, automate, and accelerate substantive work. You have a clear view on how AI changes what a data science team does and a track record of raising capability across the people around you, not just your own output. * Transformation track record: You have led a meaningful shift in how an analytical or data science team works. You are comfortable navigating resistance, building adoption across different types of people, and making change persist beyond your direct involvement. * Technical background: You have a background in probability, statistics, or a related quantitative field, with hands-on experience building and overseeing probabilistic ML models on structured commercial or financial data. * Production experience: You have managed the full lifecycle of models in production – deploying, monitoring, and retiring them. You are comfortable coordinating chains of model dependencies across different teams. * Commercial acumen: You understand how modelling supports business decisions and know when to make trade-offs between depth, delivery time, and value. * Strategic leadership: You have experience setting data science strategy, aligning work with commercial goals, and translating technical modelling for senior stakeholders so they can act on it. * People and team: You have experience managing a data science team, setting clear standards, and developing people – including having direct conversations about where the gap is and how to close it. Bonus: * Domain experience: You have worked in credit risk, lending, or customer lifetime value modelling. * Function scale: You have led a data science team of 20 or more people across multiple teams. * R&D and forecasting: You have experience shaping a modelling agenda, including probabilistic or long-term forecasting work. * Industry profile: You have represented a data science team externally – industry events, publications, or advisory roles. The salary We expect to pay from £140,000 to £200,000 for this role. But, we’re open-minded, so definitely include your salary goals with your application. We routinely benchmark salaries against market rates, and run quarterly performance reviews. The culture At iwoca, the best idea wins. We model our culture on independent thinking, challenging untested logic, and evidence-based decisions. We prioritise learning and growth, and give people the autonomy to develop in the direction that makes them most effective. We're a tech company and believe in the power of AI to help us work faster and better. We provide the infrastructure where every iwocan always has access to the best models and where those models have access to all of our data. We will help our people to learn how to use and grow with the new tools available to them. The offices We put a lot of effort into making iwoca a great place to work: * Offices in London, Leeds, Berlin, and Frankfurt with plenty of drinks and snacks. * Events and community-led groups, including running groups, padel, and monthly ping-pong and pool competitions. The benefits * Flexible working hours. * Medical insurance from Vitality, including discounted gym membership. * A private GP service (separate from Vitality) 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: we’ve been to France, Italy, Spain, and further afield. And to make sure we all keep learning, we offer: * A learning and development budget for everyone. * Company-wide talks with internal and external speakers. * Access to learning platforms like Treehouse. Useful links: * iwoca benefits & policies * Interview welcome pack