Data Science Manager, Financial Crime Remote

“Previously Startups of London has featured Monzo in our article The Complete List of Unicorn Startups in the UK 2022.

You can also click on the company name above or go to their company page from here and learn more about their culture, business and management.

As for the role; Monzo is looking for a Data Science Manager, Financial Crime to join their company. Learn more about the role, requirements as well as benefits in the below description. Click on the Apply Now button to complete job application.”

– Startup of London Team

The Role

As a Data science manager, you’ll be working in an ever-changing environment where we are building and iterating on our financial crime defence capabilities to ensure we keep Monzo and our customers safe. As a financial crime team, we have a large impact on Monzo’s bottom line as fraud and scams are usually some of the biggest cost line items in a bank’s P&L. In addition, we greatly influence the overall customer experience and how protected they are. Most of the work we do results in directly measurable customer or company benefits which is incredibly satisfying.

What you’ll be working on:

Our Data Science Managers don’t have a permanent assignment to a problem space and might rotate into different financial crime areas after some time. The major problem spaces that we are working in are our fraud prevention, transaction monitoring for different types of suspicious activity, customer risk assessment, and operational tooling to name the biggest ones. At the moment we are about 21 people in financial crime data, including 3 other Data Science managers who will be your peers.

As part of your job, you’ll work closely with product managers, engineers, designers, and researchers in an agile product environment. You’ll champion the use of data, and bring ideas to life through rigorous experimentation and A/B testing. You’ll help us get the most out of large volumes of data stored on a modern cloud-native data platform and with spotting opportunities to make each area of financial crime work even better for our users and for Monzo. As a people manager, you’ll help your team grow, hire new team members, supporting their personal development. Your team will drive product innovation and you’ll see the impact of all your work on the product changes we make.

Your day-to-day 

• Be a key leader in building a discipline of exceptional data scientists working on making Monzo world-class at tackling financial crime
• Establish yourself as a trusted partner to the financial crime and product leadership teams with the capacity for getting things done, be it either hands-on or by leading others
• Bring data leadership and rigor to our financial crime function and build a strategic understanding of the business while structuring complex projects to bring them to life
• Set the data strategy for the financial crime area – from working with engineers to ensure that we capture the right data to building predictive models that help us detect financial crime
• Have the opportunity to manage exceptional Data Scientists and help their career progression and development
• Be able to work on all aspects of financial crime as we operate as one team

You should apply if:

What we’re doing here at Monzo excites you!

• You have multiple years of experience in data, working as a lead Analyst or Data Scientist
• You consider yourself an empathetic leader and have experience managing multiple data scientists and you really enjoy that part of the job
• You’re as comfortable getting hands-on as well as taking a step back and thinking strategically and proactively identifying opportunities
• You have experience working together and collaborating with senior business stakeholders and product teams
• You’re familiar with using a variety of Data Science tools (from business intelligence, experimentation, and causal inference through to machine learning), and coding languages (Python and SQL). You know when to pick the right tool, and can help others do the same
• You are passionate about reducing financial crime with data-driven strategies

Nice to haves

• Experience working within a finance function
• Experience working in a highly regulated environment
• Knowledge of accounting / ERP systems and principles (e.g. NetSuite, Oracle EBS, SAP)
• Knowledge of regulatory reporting and treasury operations in retail banking
• Experience with strongly-typed languages (e.g. Go, Java, Scala…)
• Working knowledge of Python, Airflow, dbt, and looker
• Used to AGILE ways of working (Kanban, Scrum) tracked in JIRA or Trello

The Interview Process:

Our interview process involves 3 main stages We promise not to ask you any brain teasers or trick questions!

• 30-minute recruiter call 
• A 45-minute call with the hiring manager 
• 3 x 1-hour video calls with various team members

Our average process takes around 3-4 weeks but we will always work around your availability. You will have the chance to speak to our recruitment team at various points during your process but if you 

do have any specific questions ahead of this please contact us at tech-hiring@monzo.com

What’s in it for you:

 We can help you relocate to the UK 

We can sponsor visas

This role can be based in our London office, but we’re open to distributed working within the UK (with ad hoc meetings in London).

We offer flexible working hours and trust you to work enough hours to do your job well, at times that suit you and your team.

Learning budget of £1,000 a year for books, training courses, and conferences

If you prefer to work part-time, we’ll make this happen whenever we can – whether this is to help you meet other commitments or strike a great work-life balance.