Lead Machine Learning Scientist, Search (AI)

Location: London or Cardiff office, or distributed working within the UK, with occasional meetings in London. Relocation to the UK can be supported.

Salary: £115,000–£150,000 per year, plus performance-linked incentive awards and benefits.

Company

hirify.global is a UK digital bank building intuitive financial products and an intelligent Co-pilot to help customers manage their financial lives.

What you will do

• Lead the development and deployment of advanced machine learning models for search, discovery, and financial assistance.
• Build models using user and product embeddings, contextual bandits, and personalised ranking algorithms.
• Ship scalable, explainable, and responsible AI solutions to more than 15 million customers.
• Own the end-to-end journey from identifying business problems to delivering measurable production impact.
• Experiment with technical approaches, justify their effectiveness, and align solutions with customer and business needs.
• Provide technical leadership as an individual contributor while collaborating with Backend, Product, Machine Learning, and Data Science teams.

Requirements

• Several years of experience leading the development and deployment of advanced machine learning models that solve real business problems.
• Experience developing and shipping state-of-the-art ML models to production and delivering measurable business impact.
• Fluent Python, extensive hands-on experience with scikit-learn, and comfort using SQL.
• Experience working with ambiguity, resolving it with teams and stakeholders, and communicating ML concepts to non-specialists.
• Product mindset, customer focus, self-starter attitude, and interest in fast-moving machine learning developments.
• Ability to work from within the UK; visa sponsorship is available.

Nice to have

• Experience with personalisation, ranking, and recommendation problems in consumer applications.
• Commercial experience writing critical production code and working with microservices.
• Interest in learning Go, which is used in backend microservices.

Culture & Benefits

• Flexible working hours and distributed working within the UK.
• Ad hoc meetings in London for distributed employees.
• £1,000 annual learning budget for training courses and conferences.
• Visa sponsorship and relocation support to the UK.
• Part-time work may be possible to support other commitments or work-life balance.

Hiring process

• 30-minute recruiter call.
• 45-minute hiring manager call.
• Full loop covering ML modelling, Product & ML, behavioural, and leadership interviews.
• The process typically takes 3–4 weeks and can be adapted to candidate availability.