Head of Data Science

Hybrid in London, United Kingdom

You’ll lead multiple data science teams whose work guides decision-making across lending, product, operations, and strategy. You’ll shape how we work, ensuring that analytical insight directly influences the choices that matter most at iwoca.

Small businesses move fast. Opportunities often don’t wait, and cash flow pressures can appear overnight. To keep going, and growing, SMEs need finance that’s as flexible and responsive as they are.

That's why we built iwoca. Our smart technology, data science and five-star customer service ensures business owners can act with the speed, confidence and control they need, exactly when it's needed.

We’ve already cleared the way for 100,000 businesses with more than £4 billion in funding. Our passionate team is driven to help even more SMEs succeed, through access to better finance and other services that make running a business easier. Our ultimate mission is to support one million SMEs in their defining moments, creating lasting impact for the communities and economies they drive.

iwoca’s data scientists build probabilistic and statistical models that make lending decisions in real time, support forecasting and shape commercial strategy. Their work is deployed in production code and makes real-time lending decisions; it’s more than exploratory analysis. Successfully leading iwoca’s data science teams will require close collaboration with engineering, product, and commercial teams.

As the Head of Data Science, you’ll lead a group that focuses on rigorous, interpretable, and commercially useful modelling that is deployed, monitored, and maintained in production. You’ll set direction, shape team structure, and ensure the function’s work is grounded in commercial context and used by decision-makers across iwoca.

The group has approximately 25 data scientists, with most working in a central team and some smaller groups aligned to specific products or domains. You’ll report to one of iwoca’s co-founders, who is also a data scientist.

You’ll work with the team leads and senior data scientists who coordinate day-to-day work. You’ll help them plan, sequence, and review projects and maintain consistent standards of reasoning, communication, and methodology. You’ll help the teams decide where and how to apply their efforts – identifying where modelling adds value and where a lighter heuristic approach could be more effective.

You’ll oversee hiring and development, ensuring assessment, progression, and knowledge-sharing are fair, structured, and suited to a growing multi-team environment. You’ll shape how data science is applied at scale — how uncertainty is communicated, how analytical support is allocated, and how the function directs its effort to the highest-value work.

You’ll coordinate with Engineering, Product, and Operations teams so that projects are properly scoped, resourced, and aligned with wider priorities. You’ll represent the function in discussions that shape lending, risk, and product decisions by explaining assumptions, highlighting risks, and helping senior stakeholders act on analytical insight.

Essential

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• Strategic leadership: You have experience setting data science strategy and aligning work with commercial goals. You can translate technical modelling for senior stakeholders, make assumptions explicit, and shape the decisions that follow.
  
• Production experience: You have managed the full lifecycle of models in production – deploying, monitoring, and retiring them. You are comfortable coordinating chains of model dependencies across different teams.
  
• Commercial acumen: You understand how modelling supports business decisions and know when to make trade-offs between depth, delivery time, and value.
  
• Team development: You have a track record of hiring and developing data scientists, and establishing consistent standards for planning, peer review, and methodology.
  
• Technical background: You have a background in probability, statistics, or a related quantitative field such as mathematics or physics and can evaluate analytical work for conceptual soundness.
  

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• Experience shaping an R&D or modelling agenda, including probabilistic or long-term forecasting work
  
• Experience in domains such as credit risk, lending, or customer lifetime value
  
• Experience representing a data science function externally (for example, industry events or publications)
  

We expect to pay from £120,000 to £170,000 for this role. But, we’re open-minded, so definitely include your salary goals with your application. We routinely benchmark salaries against market rates, and run quarterly performance and salary reviews.

At iwoca, we prioritise a culture of learning, growth, and support, and invest in the professional development of our team members. We value thought and skill diversity, and encourage you to explore new areas of interest to help us innovate and improve our products and services.

We put a lot of effort into making iwoca a great place to work:

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• Offices in London, Leeds, Berlin, and Frankfurt with plenty of drinks and snacks.
  
• Events and clubs, like bingo, comedy nights, football, etc.
  

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• Flexible working hours.
  
• Medical insurance from Vitality, including discounted gym membership.
  
• A private GP service (separate from Vitality) for you, your partner, and your dependents.
  
• 25 days’ holiday per year, an extra day off for your birthday, the option to buy or sell an additional five days of annual leave, and unlimited unpaid leave.
  
• A one-month, fully paid sabbatical after four years.
  
• Instant access to external counselling and therapy sessions for team members that need emotional or mental health support.
  
• 3% Pension contributions on total earnings.
  
• An employee equity incentive scheme.
  
• Generous parental leave and a nursery tax benefit scheme to help you save money.
  
• Electric car scheme and cycle to work scheme.
  
• Two company retreats a year: we’ve been to France, Italy, Spain, and further afield.
  

And to make sure we all keep learning, we offer:

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• A learning and development budget for everyone.
  
• Company-wide talks with internal and external speakers.
  
• Access to learning platforms like Treehouse
  

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• iwoca benefits & policies
  

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• Interview welcome pack.