Working at Koyo

Senior Data Scientist

This is a UK remote position

Who we are

The current system of credit, based on bureau data, is deeply unfair, penalising people who live in lower income areas, people who are new to the country or customers who have used high risk products in the past (such as payday loans). Koyo was founded in 2018, on the principle that everyone should have access to affordable credit regardless of where they are from, where they live, or types of credit that have used.

Many seeking credit are charged excessive fees and interest rates for borrowing that cause financial problems, rather than solve them. We’re changing all that.

Koyo uses innovative technology to offer fairly priced credit to millions of UK customers. We’re based in London, with global ambitions. Koyo is backed by leading venture capital funds (the same funds that backed the likes of Revolut, Transferwise and others) and some of the most reputable angel investors in the UK. Join us, and help put an end to predatory financial firms and be part of an exciting and rewarding journey.

Our story so far

In 2016, Thomas, the founder of Koyo moved to the UK and found accessing credit to be difficult if not impossible. This is because his credit history did not follow him from his home country. He realised that having an imperfect credit history affects millions of people who are new to the country, but also people who have failed to build a credit history in the UK more generally. In September 2018 we raised our first round of venture funding and have since raised further debt and equity funding from venture capital funds and private investors.

What you'll be doing

You will be our first dedicated data scientist hire.

• Improve the accuracy of our in-house banking transaction classification engine - researching, evaluating and recommending the best machine learning algorithms.
• Analyse the banking transaction data providing insights and recommendations for summary statistics and quality measures.
• Analyse and make recommendations for policies that maximise loan approval rates whilst keeping loan defaults within target using and cross-referencing across all data-sets that are available to us (including but not limited to self-stated application data, credit reference agency block-summary and detailed data and bank transaction data).
• Working across the wider team, providing proactive and reactive reporting and analysis.
• Longer term, you will help build out the data scientist function at Koyo.

Requirements

• Remote but must be based in the UK
• Strong commercial experience, likely to have a computer science or related degree
• Entrepreneurial and excited about working at an early stage startup
• Knowledge of multiple machine learning algorithms - when to use them, when not to and how to optimise
• Basic programming knowledge - Python/Java/R
• Ability to extract, cleanse and load data in various formats and across multiple data sources.
• Expert knowledge in SQL
• Happy to work in an early stage startup
• You have a growth mindset: You’re excited to learn new things every day and have a passion to inspire and grow.
• Experience in lending ideal, but not a requirement.

Benefits

• Competitive salary.
• Equity in the business - you will own a part of the company that you are helping to build.
• Work with a rapidly growing Fintech with an innovative business model
• Opportunity to shape the strategy and direction in a company with an important mission.
• Working with bright ambitious people who take pride in what they do