Senior Machine Learning Scientist, Financial Crime

📋 Description

• • At Monzo, we're on a mission to make money work for everyone, moving away from the complicated and confusing traditional banking models. We've evolved significantly from our beginnings as a prepaid card, now offering a comprehensive suite of banking products including personal, business, and joint accounts, specialized accounts for 16-17 year olds and under-16s, credit cards, savings, investments, and pension consolidation. Our award-winning customer service, distinctive hot coral cards, and innovative features like 'get-paid-early' have consistently created magical moments for our customers. We are driven by solving problems and changing lives, not just selling products.
• • As a Senior Machine Learning Scientist within our Financial Crime team, you will play a pivotal role in safeguarding Monzo's profitability and ensuring the safety of our customers. Financial crime, including fraud and scams, represents a significant cost driver for banks, and your expertise will be instrumental in mitigating these risks. Your work will directly impact customer experience by preventing fraudulent activities and maintaining trust in our platform.
• • This role is embedded within a multidisciplinary squad, fostering close collaboration with fellow Machine Learning Scientists, Data Scientists, Backend Engineers, Operations Specialists, Product Managers, and Risk Managers. You will leverage your deep experience in developing and deploying advanced Machine Learning models to address critical financial crime challenges.
• • Key responsibilities include the automatic and accurate detection of suspicious user behaviours. A core objective is to minimize the impact on genuine customers and reduce operational costs associated with manual reviews and false positives. This requires sophisticated model development and continuous refinement.
• • You will be responsible for ensuring our detection systems are agile and adaptive, capable of quickly and appropriately responding to evolving fraud and financial crime trends. Maintaining the performance of these systems over time is crucial in staying ahead of sophisticated criminal activities.
• • A significant aspect of this role involves designing machine learning solutions that are scalable to meet the demands of a growing global user base. This includes considering infrastructure, data pipelines, and model deployment strategies that can handle increasing volumes and complexity.
• • The technical approaches you employ to solve these complex problems will be largely in your hands. We strongly encourage and support experimentation and innovation, providing a fertile ground for cutting-edge ML research and application.
• • You will be expected to rigorously justify and demonstrate the effectiveness of your proposed solutions, ensuring they align with our business objectives and meet the needs of our customers. This involves a data-driven approach to model evaluation and validation.
• • We are seeking individuals who are excited by the prospect of applying advanced ML techniques to protect customer funds, even in scenarios where accounts, cards, or phones may be compromised. This is a chance to work on high-impact problems that directly contribute to customer security.
• • Your role will involve developing and deploying sophisticated ML models. This includes, but is not limited to, deep learning, graph-based, and sequence-based architectures, with a clear focus on delivering tangible business impact.
• • You will thrive in an environment that embraces ambiguity, with a proven track record of helping teams and stakeholders navigate and resolve complex, ill-defined problems.
• • A passion for sharing knowledge and elevating the technical capabilities of the team is highly valued. You will contribute to a culture of continuous learning and improvement.
• • We expect a self-starter mindset, where you proactively identify impactful issues and opportunities, and collaboratively drive solutions without explicit direction.
• • You will be comfortable working with production Python code and possess a strong command of SQL, using them daily. While Python and SQL are core, we encourage learning Go lang, which is utilized in many of our backend microservices.
• • Strong communication skills are essential, enabling you to articulate complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• • You will contribute to building a product that you and your peers use daily, demonstrating a product mindset that prioritizes customer outcomes and data-informed decision-making.
• • Staying abreast of fast-moving developments in Machine Learning and effectively communicating these advancements to colleagues across different domains will be a key part of your role.
• • Adaptability, curiosity, and an eagerness to learn new technologies and ideas are fundamental to success in this dynamic field.
• • You will have the opportunity to shape the ML strategy within your area and contribute to the overall ML roadmap, particularly in the context of financial crime prevention.
• • Experience working within financial crime domains, operations, and regulated institutions is highly desirable, providing valuable context and domain expertise.
• • Evaluating ML models in live production environments, including the design and execution of A/B tests, is a crucial skill for demonstrating model effectiveness and iterating on solutions.
• • Commercial experience writing critical production code and working with microservices will ensure a smooth integration of your ML solutions into our existing infrastructure.
• • You will be instrumental in developing and deploying advanced ML models that directly combat fraud and financial crime, ensuring the safety and security of Monzo's customers and its operations. This role offers a unique opportunity to make a significant impact in a fast-paced, innovative fintech environment.