Lead Data Scientist

About this opportunity:

You’ll get exposure to many interesting projects across the Insurance Pensions & Investment business area within Lloyds Banking Group. We take ideas from the concept stage and work with colleagues to demonstrate how data science and machine learning can be applied to improve customer experiences and deliver value. These solutions are engineered into live machine learning systems that make a material impact on the lives of up to 26m+ customers across the whole of the UK.

As a Lead Data Scientist you will:

• Act as a technical lead within the Modelling Chapter, responsible for helping our project delivery teams to develop and implement best practice solutions.
• Own and continually improve upon our current approaches for tackling common ML use cases - e.g., price optimisation, propensity modelling, time-series forecasting, Gen AI applications, model monitoring, etc. And be prepared to defend these approaches during the model review process.
• Steer the 'Modelling Chapter' and help it address more complex problems that require new approaches to be introduced. Manage the delivery of proofs-of-concepts that demonstrate these new capabilities and how they can deliver value to future projects.
• Work closely with the ML Engineering team to define automated approaches to common workflows - e.g., for feature selection, hyperparameter tuning, model testing and monitoring, etc.
• Contribute to the recommended training curriculum and progression paths for professional development, from the graduate scheme to senior technical leads, and help steer the Modelling Guild to focus on contemporary data science topics that are relevant to Lloyds Banking Group

About us

Like the modern Britain we serve, we’re evolving. Investing billions in our people, data and tech to transform the way we meet the ever-changing needs of our 26 million customers. We’re growing with purpose. Join us on our journey and you will too…

What you’ll need

• Previous experience as a Senior Data Scientist or Technical Lead in machine learning.
• Experience leading data scientists and an ability to set technical standards.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to collaborate effectively with other teams (e.g., ML Engineering, Intelligent Automation).
• A strong ability to translate data science methods and results for nontechnical audiences and to persuade senior business stakeholders of the significance of these results for decision making.
• Thorough theoretical and applied knowledge of a broad range of statistical modelling and ML techniques, such as regression, clustering, decision trees (including random forests and gradient boosted trees), time-series forecasting and deep learning. Strong ability to coach data scientists in ensuring that the theoretical foundations of their work line up with the applied use case.
• A good working knowledge of the latest NLP and LLM techniques
• Skills in Python and SQL for data science, including how to write modular Pythonic code, familiarity with the core Python data structures and fluency with pandas and other packages commonly used for data science. Strong ability to coach data scientists in how to use these tools to tackle particular business problems and to review the code they produce.
• The ability to take subject matter knowledge (your own or that of colleagues) and incorporate it into feature selection and engineering and the hypotheses that models are allowed to test. Strong ability to coach data scientists in how to take this approach and to review how they do so.
• The ability to balance coaching and mentoring data scientists with continuing to do hands-on data science work yourself alongside them. A pragmatic, "keep it as simple as possible, but no simpler" attitude to your work and designs.

About working for us

Our focus is to ensure we're inclusive every day, building an organisation that reflects modern society and celebrates diversity in all its forms. We want our people to feel that they belong and can be their best, regardless of background, identity or culture. We were one of the first major organisations to set goals on diversity in senior roles, create a menopause health package, and a dedicated Working with Cancer initiative. And it’s why we especially welcome applications from under-represented groups. We’re disability confident. So if you’d like reasonable adjustments to be made to our recruitment processes, just let us know.

We also offer a wide-ranging benefits package, which includes:

• A generous pension contribution of up to 15%
• An annual bonus award, subject to Group performance
• Share schemes including free shares
• Benefits you can adapt to your lifestyle, such as discounted shopping
• 30 days’ holiday, with bank holidays on top
• A range of wellbeing initiatives and generous parental leave policies
• Want to do amazing work, that’s interesting and makes a difference to millions of people? Join our journey.