Lead Machine Learning Scientist (Fintech)

Location: Cardiff, London, or distributed remote working within the UK, with ad hoc meetings in London.

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

Company

hirify.global is a UK digital bank offering personal and business banking products, with a focus on making financial services simpler, more transparent, and more useful.

What you will do

• Lead the development and deployment of advanced ML and GenAI models serving hundreds of thousands of business customers.
• Shape the ML direction for Business Banking by identifying high-impact opportunities, defining success metrics, and resolving ambiguity.
• Design batch and near-real-time systems, including LLM-powered experiences, predictive models, and time-series forecasting.
• Build robust evaluation, monitoring, and responsible ML practices for production systems.
• Partner with Product, Engineering, Design, Research, Data Science, Analytics Engineering, MLOps, and Backend Engineering.
• Set technical standards, mentor colleagues, and support experimentation and iteration.

Requirements

• Several years of experience leading the development and deployment of advanced ML models that solve real business problems.
• Hands-on experience shipping state-of-the-art ML models to production and delivering measurable business impact.
• Fluent Python and extensive practical experience with scikit-learn; comfortable with SQL.
• Experience working through ambiguity, taking ownership, and collaborating with product and technical stakeholders.
• Product mindset with a focus on customer outcomes, data-informed decisions, explainability, transparency, and customer control.
• Ability to work from within the UK and attend occasional meetings in London.

Nice to have

• Experience with personalisation, ranking, recommendation, forecasting, classification, or decisioning systems.
• Experience in fintech, banking, payments, lending, invoicing, cash flow, tax, risk, or business software.
• Experience with GenAI, LLMs, agentic workflows, retrieval, evaluation frameworks, or human-in-the-loop products.
• Production coding, microservices, experimentation, A/B testing, or regulated-environment experience.

Culture & Benefits

• Flexible working hours with distributed working within the UK.
• Relocation support to the UK and visa sponsorship.
• £1,000 annual learning budget for training courses and conferences.
• Performance-based incentive awards and a broad benefits package.
• Part-time working can be arranged where possible to support personal commitments and work-life balance.

Hiring process

• 30-minute recruiter call followed by a 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.