National AI Awards 2025Discover AI's trailblazers! Join us to celebrate innovation and nominate industry leaders.

Nominate & Attend

Data Scientist (Customer Identity)

Starling Bank
Manchester
7 months ago
Applications closed

Related Jobs

View all jobs

Data Scientist

Data Scientist

Data Scientist - AI / ML, Python, Scripting, Cyber Security

Data Scientist - Inside IR35 contract

Data Scientist

Data Scientist

Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! Our vision is fast technology, fair service, and honest values. All at the tap of a phone, all the time.

Starling is the UK’s first and leading digital bank on a mission to fix banking! We built a new kind of bank because we knew technology had the power to help people save, spend and manage their money in a new and transformative way.

We’re a fully licensed UK bank with the culture and spirit of a fast-moving, disruptive tech company. We’re a bank, but better: fairer, easier to use and designed to demystify money for everyone. We employ more than 3,000 people across our London, Southampton, Cardiff and Manchester offices.

Our technologists are at the very heart of Starling and enjoy working in a fast-paced environment that is all about building things, creating new stuff, and disruptive technology that keeps us on the cutting edge of fintech. We operate a flat structure to empower you to make decisions regardless of what your primary responsibilities may be, innovation and collaboration will be at the core of everything you do. Help is never far away in our open culture, you will find support in your team and from across the business, we are in this together!

The way to thrive and shine within Starling is to be a self-driven individual and be able to take full ownership of everything around you: From building things, designing, discovering, to sharing knowledge with your colleagues and making sure all processes are efficient and productive to deliver the best possible results for our customers. Our purpose is underpinned by five Starling values: Listen, Keep It Simple, Do The Right Thing, Own It, and Aim For Greatness.

Hybrid Working

We have a Hybrid approach to working here at Starling - our preference is that you're located within a commutable distance of one of our offices so that we're able to interact and collaborate in person.

Our Data Environment

Our Data teams are aligned to divisions covering the following Banking Services & Products, Customer Identity & Financial Crime and Data & ML Engineering. Our Data teams are excited about delivering meaningful and impactful insights to both the business and more importantly our customers. Hear from the team in our latestblogsor our case studies withWomen in Tech.

We are looking for talented data professionals at all levels to join the team. We value people being engaged and caring about customers, caring about the code they write and the contribution they make to Starling. People with a broad ability to apply themselves to a multitude of problems and challenges, who can work across teams do great things here at Starling, to continue changing banking for good.

This role sits within the Customer Identity & Financial Crime data division. This team is responsible for the deployment of analytical solutions and machine learning models to prevent and detect financial crime and better understand our customers. This role specifically will focus on the customer identity domain, with a focus on identity verification, KYC and OCR technologies.

Responsibilities:

  • Build, test and deploy machine learning models which will improve and/or automate decision making
  • Collaborate with engineering, cyber, risk and operational teams teams to identify appropriate data points that are relevant for modelling, using this insight to inform the creation of predictive models
  • Conduct exploratory data analysis to identify trends, patterns and anomalies in customer identity data
  • Continuously monitor the performance of identity models in production and refine them to improve accuracy, scalability and efficiency

Requirements

We’re open-minded when it comes to hiring and we care more about aptitude and attitude than specific experience or qualifications. We think the ideal candidate will encompass most of the following:

  • Demonstrable industry experience Data Science/Machine Learning in customer identity-related projects:
    • Identity verification / KYC
    • Computer vision
    • OCR
    • Anomaly detection
  • Excellent skills in Python and SQL
  • Experience with libraries such as Scikit-learn, Tensorflow, Pytorch
  • Strong data wrangling skills for merging, cleaning and sampling data
  • Strong data visualisation and communication skills are essential
  • Understanding of the software development life cycle and experience using version control tools such as git
  • Demonstrable experience deploying machine learning solutions in a production environment

Desirables:

  • Experience with AWS/GCP
  • Desire to build explainable ML models (using techniques such as SHAP)
  • Familiarity with data privacy regulations and experience in applying these to model development

Interview process

Interviewing is a two way process and we want you to have the time and opportunity to get to know us, as much as we are getting to know you! Our interviews are conversational and we want to get the best from you, so come with questions and be curious. In general you can expect the below, following a chat with one of our Talent Team:

  • Stage 1 - 45 mins with one of the team
  • Stage 2 - Take-home challenge
  • Stage 3 - 60 mins technical interview with two team members
  • Stage 4 - 45 min final with two executives

Benefits

  • 25 days holiday (plus take your public holiday allowance whenever works best for you)
  • An extra day’s holiday for your birthday
  • Annual leave is increased with length of service, and you can choose to buy or sell up to five extra days off
  • 16 hours paid volunteering time a year
  • Salary sacrifice, company enhanced pension scheme
  • Life insurance at 4x your salary & group income protection
  • Private Medical Insurance with VitalityHealth including mental health support and cancer care. Partner benefits include discounts with Waitrose, Mr&Mrs Smith and Peloton
  • Generous family-friendly policies
  • Perkbox membership giving access to retail discounts, a wellness platform for physical and mental health, and weekly free and boosted perks
  • Access to initiatives like Cycle to Work, Salary Sacrificed Gym partnerships and Electric Vehicle (EV) leasing

About Us

You may be put off applying for a role because you don't tick every box. Forget that! While we can’t accommodate every flexible working request, we're always open to discussion. So, if you're excited about working with us, but aren’t sure if you're 100% there yet, get in touch anyway. We’re on a mission to radically reshape banking – and that starts with our brilliant team. Whatever came before, we’re proud to bring together people of all backgrounds and experiences who love working together to solve problems.

Starling Bank is an equal opportunity employer, and we’re proud of our ongoing efforts to foster diversity & inclusion in the workplace. Individuals seeking employment at Starling Bank are considered without regard to race, religion, national origin, age, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, marital status, medical condition, ancestry, physical or mental disability, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. 

When you provide us with this information, you are doing so at your own consent, with full knowledge that we will process this personal data in accordance with our Privacy Notice. By submitting your application, you agree that Starling Bank will collect your personal data for recruiting and related purposes. Our Privacy Notice explains what personal information we will process, where we will process your personal information, its purposes for processing your personal information, and the rights you can exercise over our use of your personal information.

National AI Awards 2025

Subscribe to Future Tech Insights for the latest jobs & insights, direct to your inbox.

By subscribing, you agree to our privacy policy and terms of service.

Industry Insights

Discover insightful articles, industry insights, expert tips, and curated resources.

Machine Learning Jobs UK 2025: 50 Companies Hiring Now

Bookmark this page—we refresh the Hotlist every quarter so you always know who’s really scaling their ML teams. The UK’s National AI Strategy, a £2 billion GenAI accelerator fund and a record flow of private capital have kicked ML hiring into overdrive for 2025. Whether you build production‑grade LLM services or optimise on‑device models for edge hardware, employers need your skills now. Below you’ll find 50 organisations that advertised UK‑based machine‑learning vacancies or announced head‑count growth during the past eight weeks. They’re grouped into five quick‑scan categories so you can jump straight to the type of employer—and mission—that excites you. For each company we list: Main UK hub Example live or recent vacancy Why it’s worth a look (stack, impact, culture) Search any employer on MachineLearningJobs.co.uk to see real‑time adverts, or set a free alert so fresh openings drop straight in your inbox.

Return-to-Work Pathways: Relaunch Your Machine Learning Career with Returnships, Flexible & Hybrid Roles

Returning to work after an extended break can feel like starting from scratch—especially in a specialist field like machine learning. Whether you paused your career for parenting, caring responsibilities or another life chapter, the UK’s machine learning sector now offers a variety of return-to-work pathways. From structured returnships to flexible and hybrid roles, these programmes recognise the transferable skills and resilience you’ve developed, pairing you with mentorship, upskilling and supportive networks to ease your transition back. In this guide, you’ll discover how to: Understand the current demand for machine learning talent in the UK Leverage your organisational, communication and analytical skills in ML contexts Overcome common re-entry challenges with practical solutions Refresh your technical knowledge through targeted learning Access returnship and re-entry programmes tailored to machine learning Find roles that fit around family commitments—whether flexible, hybrid or full-time Balance your career relaunch with caring responsibilities Master applications, interviews and networking specific to ML Learn from inspiring returner success stories Get answers to common questions in our FAQ section Whether you aim to return as an ML engineer, research scientist, MLOps specialist or data scientist with an ML focus, this article will map out the steps and resources you need to reignite your machine learning career.

LinkedIn Profile Checklist for Machine Learning Jobs: 10 Tweaks to Drive Recruiter Interest

The machine learning landscape is rapidly evolving, with demand soaring for experts in modelling, algorithm tuning and data-driven insights. Recruiters hunt for candidates proficient in Python, TensorFlow, PyTorch and MLOps processes. A generic profile simply won’t cut it. Our step-by-step LinkedIn for machine learning jobs checklist covers 10 targeted tweaks to ensure your profile ranks in searches and communicates your technical impact. Whether launching your ML career or seeking leadership roles, these optimisations will sharpen your professional narrative and boost recruiter engagement.