Data Scientist

🌏 London - 70 St Mary Axe (near Liverpool Street)

💷 Discretionary Company Bonus Scheme  

⏰ Monday to Friday, 9am to 5.30pm, 37.5 h pw

🏢 Hybrid, with 2–3 days a week in the office

💖 Our perks  

• 🌏25 days holiday (rising to 28 after 3 years’ service) plus bank holidays, to take time to recharge and do something you love. 
• 🤒 Private Medical - via vitality, with reward schemes paid for you and your family.
• 🤒 Health cash plan - via health shield for employee's and children claiming money back for dental, optical, etc
• 👍Pension – Oodle will contribute 5% of your salary into your pension pot to help you save for the future. 
• 🥝Free breakfast, drinks and fruit in the office – you can help yourself to cereals, toast, fizzy drinks and lots of fruit. 
• 🤟Employee discounts – discounts you can access anywhere, anytime for all major shops. 
• 👌1 day volunteer day per year – an opportunity to give back to the community each year.
• ⭐Mental health care – 6 free counselling sessions via our EAP (Employee Assistance Programme). 
• 🤧Paid sick leave – enhanced company sick pay.  
• 👨‍Enhanced family leave – we provide enhanced family leave for primary and secondary caregivers.

🚗 Oodle – who are we? 🚗  

Our mission is to empower our customers with simple experiences, straightforward lending products and compassionate support, from application to final payment and beyond.

Upgrading. Growing a family. Fresh starts. Big moves. Bumps in the road. We finance cars, but more importantly, we finance people. Since 2016, we have supported tens of thousands of customers on their car buying journey.

As an employer, your career matters to us. We want you to thrive as yourself, we celebrate diversity and inclusion, and our Talent Development team supports your learning, development and career progression.

You will join the Pricing and Credit Decisioning team, one of two teams in Credit Risk under our Chief Credit Risk Officer. The team decides who Oodle lends to and at what price, across three areas: credit decisioning, pricing and unit economics. 

🙌 The Role

Oodle are looking for a Data Scientist to help us take our Data Science capability to the next level. There is an abundance of exciting and challenging projects to get your hands on! If you love owning your work, love data, love programming and driving business outcomes then come and join us in our fun and exciting journey! We have a hybrid working policy, with the team based primarily in London near Liverpool Street Station, spending 2-3 days per week in the office.

What you’ll be getting up to:

We develop and deploy data science models and algorithms affecting Oodle’s key business objectives. For example, building credit risk scorecards, loss forecasting models, and collections models.

You will report into the Data Science and Credit Risk function. You will have opportunities to work with the wider Data team, the Profitability function, Product, and Engineering.

Our main programming language is Python. You will also need good command of SQL.

• Develop and iterate on data science models and algorithms, leveraging internal and external data such as credit bureau data and loan performance data.
• Write production-quality code and deploy to production, including testing and documentation, in collaboration with software engineers.
• Maintain and develop Oodle’s automated loan decisioning system: a system which is fundamental to the success of the business, underpinning responsible lending and good customer outcomes.
• Support model monitoring and governance.
• Conduct exploratory analyses as an integral part of the data science project life cycle.
• Partner with subject matter experts (e.g. in credit, pricing, operations) to create solutions that are technically rigorous, interpretable, and align with business requirements.
• Communicate to stakeholders across the business on model behaviour, performance, limitations, and trade-offs.
• Contribute to the design and evolution of the data and technology stack, to support scalable and reliable delivery of data science work.
• Contribute to a culture of knowledge-sharing, continuous improvement, and technical rigour in the data science team, and role model these principles within our analytics community.

The role will be a great fit if you have:

• Demonstrable experience building, validating, and iterating on statistical or machine-learning models to solve real-world problems.
• Demonstrable skills in contextualising data, applying domain understanding, and exercising judgement when training and evaluating models.
• Programming experience in Python, with a working knowledge of SQL.
• Excited by being hands-on with data, including data wrangling, exploration, and developing deep data understanding.
• Solid understanding of regression and classification principles, including model assumptions, validation techniques, and performance metrics.
• Good communication and interpersonal skills.
• An interest in owning the end-to-end data science lifecycle, from problem definition and analysis, to modelling, deploying in a production environment, and monitoring and iterating.
• Typically, 3+ years of data science work experience.
• We don’t expect candidates to tick every box. We’re looking for strong fundamentals, good judgement, and the motivation to grow.

It would be great if you had:

• Exposure to credit risk or financial services data.
• Experience working in a production environment and using version control.
• Working knowledge of data science on cloud platforms, for example AWS.
• Successfully completed a quantitative subject to degree level or above.

👩‍💻 Hiring Process  

• Initial screening with HR (30 mins)
• Hiring Manager and Technical Discussion (1 hour)
• Assessment (completed at home) (2 hours)
• Technical, in-person, to talk about your assessment and thought process (1.5 hours)
• Final Interview with the Chief Credit Risk Officer (30 mins)

💚 Our Values   

Our values are our personal brand and lay the foundation of what we care about the most. They provide us with guidance, so we can work towards the same goals. They are our DNA and are kept at the forefront of our Oodler’s mind when making business decisions.   

• Embrace being human – empathy and diversity make us stronger.  
• Strive for awesome – it’s awesome when we do better every day.  
• Everyone’s a builder – we’re in this together and we win as a team.  
• Bravely honest – we’re honest with ourselves and everyone else.  
• Think customer – they’re at the heart of everything we do. 

To find out more about our culture and what happens at Oodle check out our LinkedIn and Instagram.  

Oodle is proud to be an inclusive workplace and we recognise diversity of experience, thoughts and backgrounds leads to better customer outcomes and an environment where our colleagues can thrive. We have several DEI networks which are made up of our ‘Oodlers’ who strive to make positive impacts to our cultures. 

We’d love if you could submit your application online, but if you need an alternative method or need reasonable adjustments to take part in the interview process, please email careers@oodlefinance.com.

We are unable to sponsor work visas for this role.  To find out how we handle your personal data, please refer to our Privacy Policy.