Senior Data Scientist (Research)

About Lendable

Lendable is on a mission to make consumer finance amazing: faster, cheaper and friendlier.

We’re building one of the world’s leading fintech companies and are off to a strong start:

• One of the UK’s newest unicorns with a team of >250 people

• Among the top 10 fastest growing tech companies in the UK

• Profitable since 2017

• Backed by top investors including Balderton Capital and Goldman Sachs and most recently OTPP (Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan) in 2022

• Loved by customers with the best reviews in the market (4.9/5 across 10,000s of reviews)
  

So far, we’ve rebuilt the Big Three consumer finance products from scratch: loans, credit cards and car finance. We get money into our customers’ hands in minutes instead of days.

We’re growing fast, and there’s a lot more to do: we’re going after the two biggest Western markets (UK and US) where trillions are held by big banks with dated systems and painful processes. We launched our loans product in the US in 2022 with more product launches to follow this year!

Join us if you want to

• Take ownership across a broad remit. You are trusted to make decisions that drive a material impact on the direction and success of Lendable from day 1

• Work in small teams of exceptional people who are relentlessly resourceful to solve problems and find smarter solutions than the status quo

• Build the best technology in-house, using new data sources, machine learning, and AI to make machines do the heavy lifting
  

About the role

We are excited to be hiring a new Data Scientist into our team! Lendable is the market leader in real rate risk-based pricing, offering consumers transparency and product assurance at the point of application. Data Science sits at the heart of this USP, developing the credit risk models to underwrite loan and credit card products.

You will experiment with the latest deep learning techniques combined with a rich data repository to build and deploy best in market risk models.

Your team’s objectives

• The data science team develops proprietary machine learning models combining state of the art techniques with a variety of data sources that inform scorecard development and risk management, optimise marketing and pricing, and improve operations efficiency.

• Conduct research about new data sources and unstructured data representation.

• Data scientists work across the business in a multidisciplinary capacity to identify issues, translate business problems into data questions, analyse and propose solutions.

• Deliver data services to a wide variety of stakeholders by engineering CLI programs / APIs.

• Design, implement, manage and evaluate experiments of products and services leading to constant innovation and improvement.

How you’ll impact those objectives

• Stay up to date with the latest advancements in deep learning.

• Build and deploy deep learning models that enhance underwriting quality.

• Share expertise in deep learning with the wider team, learn from and contribute to the body of knowledge.

• Learn the domain of products that Lendable serves, understanding the data that informs strategy and risk modelling.

• Extract, parse, clean and transform data for use in machine learning.

• Research new data sources, advise on costs / benefits of introducing the data into lending decisions.

• Clearly communicate results to stakeholders through verbal and written communication.
  
  

What we’re looking for

• Knowledge of deep learning techniques (neural networks for supervised learning) and their respective pros and cons.

• Experience with Tensorflow/Keras, PyTorch etc.

• Curiosity, creativity, resourcefulness and a collaborative spirit.

• Interest in problems related to the financial services domain (specific past experience in the domain is not required).

• Experience with Jupyter / Pandas / Numpy to manipulate and analyse data.

• Confident communicator and contributes effectively within a team environment

• Self-driven and willing to lead on projects / new initiatives
  
  

The interview process

We’re not a corporate so we try our best to get things moving as quickly as possible. For this role we’d expect:

• A quick phone call with one of the team

• A short exercise to complete in your own time

• Onsite Interview
  

  • Discuss the exercise you completed

  • Meet the team you’ll work with daily

  • Meet the exec team
    
    

Life at Lendable (also check out our Glassdoor page)

• The opportunity to scale up one of the world’s most successful fintech companies.

• Best-in-class compensation including equity.

• You can work from home every Monday and Friday if you wish - on the other days we all come together IRL to be together, build and exchange ideas.

• Our in-house chef prepares fresh, healthy lunch in the office every Tuesday-Thursday

• We care for our Lendies’ well-being both physically and mentally, so we offer the highest coverage when it comes to private health insurance

• We organise an annual trip with the whole company, to celebrate our milestones and reflect on our achievements

• We're an equal opportunity employer and are looking to make Lendable the most inclusive and open workspace in London