Data Scientist

Yaspa is an award-winning fintech that connects identity and money to simplify and accelerate the way we pay. Founded in 2017 by a former Worldpay CTO, Yaspa uses open banking to provide instant bank payments that are faster, more secure and more cost-effective than cards, and to help regulated businesses seamlessly verify customers and their payments. Yaspa operates across the UK and Europe, is regulated by the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority, and is backed by leading investors including Fin Capital, SGH Capital & Metavallon VC.

Yaspa has recently secured a $12 million (£9m) investment led by Discerning Capital with participation from longstanding Yaspa investor Techstars Ventures. This milestone funding will accelerate our expansion into the US market as we continue to transform payments and identity services for regulated businesses.

The role

We are seeking a skilled data scientist to contribute to our new Customer Risk and Customer Health Check platform, powered by open banking. Your role will involve developing a Machine Learning product that analyzes customers' transactional data (provided with their consent) to generate insights based on their spending patterns. These insights will be applied across sectors like loans for risk management and IGaming for managing customer spending behaviors. You will play a crucial role in our transition from a payment-focused business to one that leverages AI and machine learning to better understand our customers.

We’re looking for data scientists with a strong grasp of Machine Learning who thrive in a fast-paced, agile environment and can help expand Yaspa's AI capabilities. You’ll join a close-knit, multidisciplinary team that includes frontend, backend, and full-stack developers, release engineers, and testers, with direct reporting to the CTO. Experience in the following areas is a plus: finance, open banking, iGaming, startups, or enterprise companies dealing with real-time processing.

Responsibilities

• You will use Python, with a strong grounding in feature engineering, model evaluation, and inference pipelines to help shape the future of our product offerings
• Lead data labeling at scale to produce ground-truth datasets and use ML techniques to maximise labelling efficiency
• Act as a subject matter expert in Analytics: Strong understanding of statistics, experimental design, and hypothesis testing to identify trends and patterns, and develop predictive models
• Design intuitive visualisations to communicate findings and insights to clients, technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Lead model deployment with an eye for performance, scalability, and real time low-latency inference

Other points you’ll support on:

• Bring experience or gain knowledge to act as a subject matter expert in open banking, payment networks (ACH, RTP), and real-time risk infrastructure is a strong plus.
• Bring experience or gain knowledge to act as a subject matter expert in designing and deploying real-time risk models, ideally in the context of A2A payments or other financial transaction systems is a strong plus.
• Bring experience or gain knowledge to act as a subject matter expert in fraud detection, creditworthiness assessment, and optimising transaction approval rates using advanced DS/ML techniques is a strong plus.

Experience

Required skills

• Hands-on experience building and deploying ML models in Python
• SQL skills and familiarity with AWS for deployment and data workflows.
• Strong knowledge of statistical modelling, anomaly detection, clustering, and supervised/unsupervised learning
• Experience working with large-scale data
• Proven success collaborating with product and engineering teams to ship ML-based features and tools
• Strong communication skills and business acumen to present complex technical ideas to non-technical stakeholders
• Curious, proactive, and comfortable working in ambiguity in a scaling startup environment
• Proficiency with data visualisation tools such as Tableau, PowerBI
• Degree with 5+ years of relevant experience, OR equivalent

Nice to Have

• Demonstrated ability to design and validate features using transactional and behavioral data from financial services
• Proven track record in payment risk, fraud detection, or credit decisioning is strongly preferred
• Experience with model governance and monitoring in regulated environments
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure), preferably AWS, ML tools such as the AWS suite: Sagemaker

Key Details

Reporting to

Lead Data Scientist

Hours

Full time

Location

London - Hybrid WFH model, x2 days a week onsite (Wed/Thurs)

Working with Yaspa

We are a fun, collaborative team based in London (though many of us work remotely for part of the week). Benefits of working with us include:

• A strong focus on culture - We’re a friendly bunch who work hard and support each other; if you’re excited by personal and professional growth, and being able to really make your mark, then this is the place for you!
• Flexible hours and hybrid working - We are in the office 2 days a week (typically Wednesdays and Thursdays), where we collaborate and learn from each other. This is matched by the balance of WFH to allow you to manage your days autonomously.
• The best tech - You will get a Macbook on your first day
• WFH set-up allowance - Along with your new laptop, we will also provide you an allowance so you can get your perfect set up sorted.
• Quarterly socials - The Yaspa team is fun and curious, so we make sure we get together to go-kart, throw darts, play board games and generally enjoy ourselves!
• Mental and physical health support - We provide you with an app that’s specially tailored to support your health, as well as access to 24-hour advice and free GP appointments. You can also access counselling and use the app for all parts of your life.
• Generous holiday allowance - As well as all the UK public bank holidays, you get 28 days of holiday to enjoy and take as you’d like. Emails off, sunnies on!
• Pension (up to 3% matched contributions) - For planning ahead!

Note

• We cannot offer Visa sponsorship
• We're not working with external agencies at this current time.

Next steps

Interested? We’d love to hear from you.

Please apply via LinkedIn with your CV and a covering letter explaining why you think you’re the right person for this role.

You can find out more about us at yaspa.com.

Please note that as an equal opportunities employer, Yaspa is committed to the equal treatment of all current and prospective employees and does not condone discrimination on the basis of age, disability, sex, sexual orientation, pregnancy and maternity, race or ethnicity, religion or belief, gender identity, or marriage and civil partnership.

We aspire to have a diverse and inclusive workplace and strongly encourage suitably qualified applicants from a wide range of backgrounds to apply and join Yaspa.