Head of Data Science, Credit Risk Analytics

About The Company

About Cleo

At Cleo, we're not just building another fintech app. We're embarking on a mission to fundamentally change humanity's relationship with money. Imagine a world where everyone, regardless of background or income, has access to a hyper-intelligent financial advisor in their pocket. That's the future we're creating.

Cleo is a rare success story: a profitable, fast-growing unicorn with over $300 million in ARR and growing over 2x year-over-year. This isn't just a job; it's a chance to join a team of brilliant, driven individuals who are passionate about making a real difference. We have an exceptionally high bar for talent, seeking individuals who are not only at the top of their field but also embody our culture of collaboration and positive impact.

If you’re driven by complex challenges that push your expertise, the chance to shape something truly transformative, and the potential to share in Cleo’s success as we scale, while growing alongside a company that’s scaling fast, this might be your perfect fit.

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About The Role

We’re looking for a Head of Data Science to lead the measurement, monitoring, and optimisation of Cleo’s credit performance. This is a high-impact role at the heart of how we manage risk and drive sustainable growth. You’ll own the frameworks, metrics, and deep-dive analyses that keep our credit products healthy and ensure that when performance shifts, we understand why and act quickly.

Sitting within the Risk & Payments pillar, you’ll lead a team of analysts to deliver clear, actionable insights across arrears, yield, LTV, and portfolio performance, working closely with Credit Policy, Decision Science, Product, and Finance. You’ll be setting the measurement standards for the company, diagnosing portfolio trends, and shaping how we evaluate and implement policy changes.

This role is ideal for someone who thrives at the intersection of data, systems thinking, and stakeholder influence. You’ll be equally comfortable explaining SHAP outputs to a data scientist, talking loss economics with finance, and summarising driver analysis for senior leadership.

Key Responsibilities

Credit Performance Measurement & Monitoring:

• Own the design and maintenance of Cleo’s credit risk metric framework, including arrears, default, yield, LTV, and marginal loss rates.
• Build and maintain dashboards and alerts for early detection of arrears, roll-rate shifts, and decisioning anomalies.
• Ensure definitions, thresholds, and escalation processes are consistent, documented, and used company-wide.

Model Understanding & Monitoring

• Partner with the Risk Modelling team to turn model health metrics (AUC, PSI, calibration, feature drift) into clear recommendations for policy or product changes.
• Detect and diagnose feature shift or concept drift, ensuring model inputs remain valid and predictive.
• Lead investigations into performance deviations, separating model-driven changes from macro or operational causes.

Analytical Deep-Dives

• Lead root cause analysis for deterioration in key metrics such as arrears spikes or yield compression.
• Own investigations from question → analysis → recommendation, and present your work to Risk, Product, and Leadership.
• Deliver driver analysis (SHAP, feature importance, decomposition) for changes in portfolio performance.
• Quantify the risk-adjusted impact of new or changing product features on portfolio health.
• Design and analyse multivariate experiments on underwriting, pricing, or repayment flows, and translate results into actionable risk strategies

Policy & Decisioning Support

• Partner with Credit Policy and Decision Science to design robust evaluation frameworks for policy changes.
• Quantify the marginal impact of policy shifts, controlling for macro or seasonal effects.
• Support elasticity and profitability modelling to optimise amounts, pricing, and feature-level decisioning.

Team Leadership & Stakeholder Management

• Manage and mentor Credit Data Scientists/Analysts, setting clear priorities and deliverables.
• Translate complex analytical findings into clear business implications for senior leadership.
• Build strong cross-functional relationships with Commercial, Product, Data Science, and Finance.

What We’re Looking For

Experience & Skills:

• Strong analytical skills with fluency in SQL and Python
• Ability to interpret and communicate model performance metrics, feature importance, and confidence intervals.
• Background in collaborating with decision science or data science teams on feature engineering and model evaluation.
• Experience conducting large scale A/B experiments and interpreting results to drive product and business decisions
• Fluent in credit portfolio metrics – e.g. arrears buckets, roll rates, loss rate, yield/marginal loss – and how they tie to unit economics and P&L
• Experience building and maintaining performance monitoring systems and alerting frameworks.
• Hands‑on experience working with predictive models (e.g. credit, fraud, marketing), including interpreting metrics like AUC/Gini, calibration, PSI/CSI, drift
• Experience collaborating with commercial and finance teams on business metric forecasting
• Track record of taking analyses all the way through to shipped changes and measurable impact

Leadership & Influence

• Experience managing or mentoring analysts and structuring team output for maximum impact.
• Skilled at translating technical analysis into actionable recommendations for senior stakeholders.
• Able to balance short-term monitoring needs with long-term framework building.

Nice To Have

• Familiarity with short-term or revolving credit products.
• Experience working with both UK and US regulatory frameworks.

This role is for you if…

• You spend most of your time in SQL and Python working directly from the warehouse
• You’re used to owning analyses end‑to‑end – from defining the question, to pulling data, to recommending changes
• You’ve worked with predictive models (credit/fraud/propensity/etc.) and think in terms of AUC, calibration, drift, and economics

This role is not a fit if…

• Your experience is mainly credit policy / underwriting with light analysis support
• Your primary tools are Excel, SAS, or Access, and you rarely write SQL yourself
• You’re looking for a risk policy or regulatory role rather than hands‑on analytics

What do you get for all your hard work?

• A competitive compensation package (base + equity) with 3-annual reviews, aligned to our termly OKR planning cycles.
• The salary banding is: £116,510 - £144,319 UK, London Hybrid / £111,296 - £139,273 UK, Remote
• Work at one of the fastest-growing tech startups, backed by top VC firms, Balderton & EQT Ventures
• A clear progression plan. We want you to keep growing. That means trying new things, leading others, challenging the status quo and owning your impact. Always with our complete support.
• Flexibility. We can’t fight for the world’s financial health if we’re not healthy ourselves. We work with everyone to make sure they have the balance they need to do their best work

Work where you work best. We’re a globally distributed team. If you live in London we have a hybrid approach, we’d love you to spend one day a week or more in our beautiful office. If you’re outside of London, we’ll encourage you to spend a couple of days with us a few times per year. And we’ll cover your travel costs, naturally.

Other Benefits

• Company-wide performance reviews every 4 months
• Generous pay increases for high-performing team members
• Equity top-ups for team members getting promoted
• 25 days annual leave a year + public holidays (+ an additional day for every year you spend at Cleo, up to 30 days)
• 6% employer-matched pension in the UK
• Private Medical Insurance via Vitality, dental cover, and life assurance
• Enhanced parental leave
• 1 month paid sabbatical after 4 years at Cleo
• Regular socials and activities, online and in-person
• We'll pay for your OpenAI subscription
• Online mental health support via Spill
• Workplace Nursery Scheme
• And many more!

Welcoming Everyone

We strongly encourage applications from people of colour, the LGBTQ+ community, people with disabilities, neurodivergent people, parents, carers, and people from lower socio-economic backgrounds.

If there’s anything we can do to accommodate your specific situation, please let us know.

Download the Test Flight

App access for people in the UK & Europe: If you are an iOS user, please use this link to sign up to our TestFlight version of the app, so you can have a play around with the functionality and features: https://testflight.apple.com/join/fDG9hWng

By submitting this application, I confirm that all the information given by me in this application for employment and any additional documents attached hereto are true to the best of my knowledge and that I have not wilfully suppressed any material fact. I confirm I have disclosed if applicable any previous employment with Cleo AI. I accept that if any of the information given by me in this application is in any way false or incorrect, my application may be rejected, any offer of employment may be withdrawn or my employment with Cleo AI may be terminated summarily or I may be dismissed. By submitting this application, I agree that my personal data will be processed in accordance with Cleo AI's Candidate Privacy Notice