Senior Data Science Strategist - Featurespace

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Visa is a world leader in payments and technology, with over 259 billion payments transactions flowing safely between consumers, merchants, financial institutions, and government entities in more than 200 countries and territories each year. Our mission is to connect the world through the most innovative, convenient, reliable, and secure payments network, enabling individuals, businesses, and economies to thrive while driven by a common purpose – to uplift everyone, everywhere by being the best way to pay and be paid.

Make an impact with a purpose-driven industry leader. Join us today and experience Life at Visa.

As a Senior Data Science Strategist you will work alongside data scientists helping us deliver success on behalf of our customers by providing consulting expertise to customers on our advanced machine learning models and rules-based solutions that predict individual customer behaviours and prevent fraud and financial crime in real-time.

By combining data science fluency with a strong customer focus and consultancy mind-set, you will play a crucial role in ensuring that analytical requirements are properly understood, that optimal analytical solutions to the problems identified are delivered end-to-end, and that – whether a large, multinational bank or a start-up fintech company – every customer is set up to succeed in fighting fraud and financial crime.

Our EMEA team is based in Cambridge and London but work with customers across the entire region. For this role you will, in line with Visa’s global policy, ideally be comfortable coming into either the Cambridge or London office three times per week.

We hire people with a willingness to adapt to a variable role, so along with the key responsibilities below, we ask for ownership of any other duties as required.

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• Lead the end-to-end delivery of analytics facilitating customers and internal teams in preparation for each stage
  
• Review and lock down project scope by understanding analytical requirements, proactively anticipating any misalignment with statements of work or scope creep
  
• Take the lead on internal and customer meetings where appropriate, handling questions confidently and pushing for key decisions from stakeholders
  
• Drive interactions with customers to understand the problems they want to solve, proposing optimal analytical solutions in scoping and design phases
  
• Educate customers on our platform and analytic solutions
  
• Work with customers to understand the opportunities and constraints of their existing data in the context of our analytical solutions
  
• Proactively unblock deliveries and ensure timely deliveries, including running additional workshops, holding meetings, and aligning stakeholders
  
• Advise and lead the customer through data readiness checks, understanding common data issues and resolving them efficiently
  
• Assist internal teams with the development and deployment of statistical models and algorithms for integration with Featurespace products
  
• Become expert in customer data structures and processes, translate information to internal development teams as required
  
• Produce, review and quality control materials which feedback analytic results to customers (reports, presentations, visualisations)
  
• Advise customer QA teams on the best strategies for effective analytical testing and support test phases
  
• Lead customer Data Science and Analytics groups towards successful model development and deployment
  
• Evaluate analytical results on live systems and work with customers to suggest opportunities for improvement and for expanding existing solutions
  
• Act as a trusted contact and analytics expert to Featurespace's highest profile accounts for queries relating to their analytics
  
• Advocate for the customer when appropriate to engineering and product functions for enhancements to the analytic and product development roadmaps
  
• Drive team-wide improvements, provide feedback to improve processes, and contribute to internal change initiatives to enable teams to deliver more efficiently
  

Required experience:

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• Good degree in a scientific or numerate discipline, e.g. Computer Science, Physics, Mathematics, Engineering
  
• Excellent client facing skills, able to communicate complex analytical concepts to a variety of audiences, especially in a data science context
  
• Ability to understand complex systems quickly
  
• Strong problem-solving skills in data-centric applications with motivation to take on novel problems
  
• Strong, clear written and verbal communication skills
  
• Experience with software engineering practices, version control and the Unix command line
  
• Strong technical and analytical skills with the ability to pick up new technologies quickly
  
• Ability to manage and prioritise changeable workload ensuring deadlines are met
  
• Experience working with customers to gather complex requirements including analytical system design, data integration design and model design
  
• Stakeholder management experience and managing customer expectations
  
• Knowledge of Python and familiarity with complex SQL queries
  
• Industry experience in financial services, fraud and fraud strategy
  
• Experience in requirements management, business analysis or consulting
  
• Experience delivering enterprise software systems into large organisations
  
• Knowledge of fundamental machine learning concepts (feature engineering, algorithms, model evaluation, model bias)
  

Great to have:

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• Experience deploying statistical models and analytical algorithms in industry
  
• Experience handling and mining large, diverse datasets
  
• Basic knowledge of event-driven systems and distributed computing for stateful systems
  
• Experience managing and developing high-performing individuals
  
• Experience with model governance or awareness of ML governance in production
  

Visa is an EEO Employer. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability or protected veteran status. Visa will also consider qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with EEOC guidelines and applicable local law.

Cambridge, England, United Kingdom