Data Scientist - Operations Strategy team

Hybrid in London, UK

Imagine a world where every small business has the power to thrive. That's the world we're building at iwoca. Small businesses aren't just statistics – they're the heartbeat of our communities, the character of our high streets, and the engine of our economy. Since 2012, we've revolutionised how these businesses access finance, turning what was once a lengthy, frustrating process into something remarkable: funding that's fast, flexible, and actually works for modern businesses.

Our impact speaks for itself: we've provided billions in funding to more than 150,000 businesses across Europe, making us one of the continent's leading fintech innovators. But we're just getting started. Our mission? To empower one million businesses with the financial tools they deserve.

We combine cutting-edge technology and data science with genuine human understanding to make finance feel less like a barrier and more like a superpower. Whether a business is managing cash flow or seizing unexpected opportunities, we ensure they get the funds they need – often within minutes.

iwoca's data scientists specialise in supervised machine learning, statistical inference and exploratory statistics, focusing on tabular and time-series data. Their work emphasises quantitative predictions through the analysis of conditional probabilities and expectations, using medium-sized datasets.

There are approximately 200 members of the Operations team working in London and Leeds to deliver an exceptional level of customer service. Our eight-person Operations Strategy team works to make our customer-facing teams more efficient and more effective.

As a Data Scientist in our Operations Strategy team, you will play a crucial role working to set up and analyse tests, and to build statistical models. The data-driven insights you produce will help us develop strategies to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of our Operations teams, all while maintaining an exceptional level of customer service.

• Strategy and innovation: Work closely with the Head of Operations Strategy, Operations staff and other stakeholders to ensure that your work aligns with business goals and achieves valuable commercial outcomes.

• Design experiments to compare the performance of different strategies and evaluate them to inform decisions.

• Share your findings and modelling with the wider business to impact our strategy.

• Ownership and influence: Independently build models to help solve our business problems, with responsibility for the solution design.

• Promote analytical rigour within the team, ensuring that our experimental designs are correctly defined and that we evaluate tests without bias.

• iwoca lives and breathes data, so data scientists have a key role in decision-making.

• Development opportunities: Join our community of analysts/data scientists/statisticians to ensure alignment in methodology across iwoca. You’ll be part of a peer group with whom you can discuss best practices or the latest advances so that you share and deepen your technical expertise

• Build expertise in Operations processes across the full range of the customer journey, from signup through to collections.

Here are some examples of projects you might work on:

• Setting up, monitoring and analysing split tests to help understand the value of operations activities. This could include determining the return on investment of different types of outbound calls that are made by our account managers and using this to prioritise these calls effectively to maximise the effectiveness of the team.

• Building predictive models based on customer satisfaction data, to determine whether changes that are made to operations' processes genuinely improve customer satisfaction

• Building statistical models to enhance the ability of operations teams to do accurate forecasting and capacity planning

Essential:

• A PhD in a relevant numerate discipline or previous experience in solving business problems in industry with statistics or machine learning techniques.

• Ability to dive deep into the business context and translate data into actionable insights.

• Strong problem-solving skills in probability and statistics.

• Proficiency with data manipulation and modelling tools, for example pandas, statsmodels, and R.

• Self-driven with the capability to efficiently manage projects end-to-end.

• Excellent communication skills, you tailor your communication style and the technical detail according to your audience.

• Python experience (we mostly work in Python).

• Experience with experimental design and Bayesian analysis.

The salary range is £60,000 - £90,000 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 and salary reviews.

At iwoca, we prioritise a culture of learning, growth, and support, and invest in the professional development of our team members. We value thought and skill diversity, and encourage you to explore new areas of interest to help us innovate and improve our products and services.

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 clubs, like bingo, comedy nights, football, etc.

• 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.

• iwoca benefits & policies

• Interview welcome pack