Lead Machine Learning Scientist, FinCrime

Lead Machine Learning Scientist, FinCrime

Location: Cardiff, London or Remote (UK)

We are seeking a Lead Machine Learning Scientist to join Monzo's FinCrime team. You will lead the development and deployment of advanced machine learning models to detect financial crime and fraud, while protecting genuine customers and optimising operational costs.

About our Machine Learning FinCrime Team

Our Financial Crime Data team consists of 25+ people across analytics engineers, data analysts, machine learning scientists and data scientists. You will be part of a fast-moving environment building defensible capabilities to keep Monzo and our customers safe. Our work has a direct impact on customer experience and the company’s bottom line by reducing fraud and scams in financial transactions.

Our ML scientists work on problems spanning fraud detection and prevention, transaction monitoring for suspicious activity, customer risk assessment and operational tooling.

What you’ll be working on

A Lead Machine Learning Scientist is a technical individual contributor (IC) leadership role. You will be expected to leverage deep experience in developing and deploying advanced ML models on a modern cloud-native data platform to:

• Automatically and accurately detect suspicious user behaviors while minimising impact to genuine customers and operational costs
• Adapt quickly to changing fraud and financial crime trends, maintaining performance over time

You will justify and demonstrate effectiveness, ensuring the approach meets business and customer needs. You will provide technical leadership and ship high-impact ML solutions, collaborating with product managers, data scientists, backend engineers and designers in an agile environment. You will also help steer technical work and raise standards within the ML discipline.

This will involve:

• Identifying and scoping opportunities across the organisation to tackle financial crime and fraud with ML
• Leading the design and development of advanced real-time ML models, including neural networks, graph-based and sequence-based architectures
• Providing technical leadership to raise levels of expertise and best practices, including mentoring others
• Working with the MLOps team to drive tooling for rapid model iteration and lifecycle optimisation

You should apply if

What we’re doing at Monzo excites you.

• Multiple-year track record of leading development and deployment of advanced ML models to tackle real business problems, preferably in a fast-moving tech company
• Experience shipping deep learning, graph-based or sequence-based ML architectures to production with measurable business impact
• You are impact-driven and own the end-to-end journey from problem to measurable production impact
• You are a self-starter who proactively identifies issues and opportunities and tackles them
• Interest in reducing financial crime and protecting customers with data-driven strategies
• Extensive experience writing production Python code and strong SQL; comfortable with these daily and keen to learn Go
• Experience working in a team dealing with ambiguity and helping resolve it
• Desire to be involved in building a product you and others use daily
• Product mindset focused on customer outcomes and data-informed decision making
• Interest in fast-moving ML developments and ability to communicate ideas to non-domain colleagues
• Adaptable, curious and eager to learn new technologies

Nice to have

• Experience with financial crime and regulated institutions
• Commercial experience writing production-ready code and working with microservices

The interview process

Our interview process involves four stages. We will not ask brain teasers or trick questions.

• 30-minute recruiter call
• 45-minute call with hiring manager
• 60-minute product & ML interview
• 60-minute behavioural interview

Our average process takes around 3–4 weeks and we will work around your availability. If you have questions, contact

What’s in it for you

We offer visa sponsorship and the option to locate in our London office or work remotely within the UK. We provide flexible hours, a learning budget of £1,000 per year for training and conferences, relocation support where applicable, and other benefits.

Equal opportunities for everyone. Monzo is an equal opportunity employer and values a diverse and inclusive workplace.

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