Data Scientist

Come join the Equifax UK Product Analytics & Innovation team and develop market-leading scores, models and analytical solutions using the latest cloud-based technologies, techniques and tooling. Be part of a growing and diverse team tasked with creating the next generation of statistical models, machine-learning algorithms and AI-based products and services.

As an Equifax Data Scientist, you will play a pivotal role in the Product Analytics & Innovation team. You will work closely with internal clients and stakeholders to proactively understand their challenges, propose and develop solutions and lead the execution of analytical and consultancy projects, including the design and development of complex modelling assignments utilising CRA data. You will have frequent engagements with stakeholders and will manage multiple analytics and consultancy projects.

Our Data Scientist roles are unique. The ideal candidate is a rare hybrid; a scientist with the programming abilities to scrape, combine, and manage data from a variety of sources and a statistician who knows how to derive insights from the information within. He or she will combine these skills to create new prototypes with the creativity and thoroughness to ask and answer the deepest questions about the data, what secrets it holds, and to push the boundaries of what is possible with big data. Want to know more?

*What You'll Do:*

• Strategic Data Utilisation: Enable the organisation to make better decisions, innovate, and grow by effectively using its data assets.
• End-to-End Solution Development: Develop and deploy solutions by independently preparing datasets, performing analysis, and building predictive models, risk assessments, and other analytical tools.
• Data Preparation and Engineering: Create data pipelines to collect, integrate, consolidate, cleanse, and structure large, complex datasets from various sources for analytical use.
• Analytical Strategy & Innovation: Support the overall analytical strategy by understanding technical capabilities and suggesting opportunities for new, enhanced solutions.
• Data Analysis & Interpretation: Analyse and interpret large data assets to create multiple innovative solution components, applying both business and technical expertise.
• Problem-Solving & Collaboration: Work on highly complex problems across multiple domains, collaborating with other teams to develop advanced solutions such as fraud detection and recommendation engines.
• Communication & Storytelling: Summarise, visualise, and present analytical findings and results to management and business users in a clear, compelling way.
• Data Quality & Governance: Develop rules and tracking processes to maintain high data quality, and implement improvements based on best practices for data management and security.
• Staying Current & Proposing Solutions: Keep up with the latest trends and advancements in cloud platforms (like GCP) and related technologies, actively proposing and evaluating new solutions.
• Mentorship & Quality Assurance: Guide and mentor junior Data Scientists, and review their work to ensure the quality of their dataset implementations.
• Communicate results to external stakeholders and mid level leadership, able to communicate business impact of work

What Experience You Need

• BSc degree in a STEM major or equivalent discipline
• Extensive & current experience in a related analytical role
• Held a similar analytical position in a commercial lending business or a similar business to Equifax
• Extensive exposure to commercial data assets e.g Companies House data at a minimum
• Experience building Commercial Credit Scores including risk, PD and business failure scores
• Advanced skills using programming languages such as Python or SQL, and intermediate level experience with scripting languages
• Proven track record of designing and developing predictive models in real-world applications
• Experience with model performance evaluation and predictive model optimisation for accuracy and efficiency
• Additional role-based certifications may be required depending upon region/BU requirements
• Experience building and maintaining moderately-complex data pipelines, troubleshooting issues, transforming and entering data into a data pipeline in order for the content to be digested and usable for future projects
• Experience designing and implementing complex data models and experience enabling optimisation to improve performance

*What could set you apart*

• Cloud experience using GCP or Amazon AWS
• Exposure to machine learning techniques
• Exposure to model implementation and testing techniques
• Google Cloud Certification
• Experience navigating the security governance arena
• Deep understanding of the industry / regulatory landscape, particularly for commercial business lending
• Passion for data science, data mining, machine learning and experience with big data architectures and methods
• A Master's degree in a quantitative field (Statistics, Mathematics, Economics)