Senior Data Scientist

Job Title: Senior Data Scientist Location: Manchester or Haywards Heath (hybrid working) Role Overview Markerstudy Group are looking for a Senior Data Scientist to join a quickly growing company in developing ambitious solutions across a range of insurance lines, by leveraging vast data assets and state-of-the-art processing capabilities. Markerstudy is a leading provider of private insurance in the UK, insuring around 5% of the private cars on the UK roads, 20% of commercial vehicles and over 30% of motorcycles in total premium levels of circa £1b. The majority of business is written as the insurance pricing provider behind household names such as Tesco, Sainsbury’s, O2, Halifax, AA, Saga and Lloyds Bank to list a few. As a Senior Data Scientist, you will use your advanced analytical skills to: Lead the development of cutting-edge, bespoke machine learning predictive models, including risk classification, claims behaviour and fraud Identify and create data solutions that create value Work collaboratively with the pricing, claims handling and fraud teams to provide insight across the business Your ideas and solutions will enable improvements to products, prices and processes giving Markerstudy a critical advantage in the increasingly competitive insurance market. Your ideas and solutions will enable improvements to products, prices and processes giving Markerstudy a critical advantage in the increasingly competitive insurance market. Identify and create solutions that leverage vast data assets and state-of-the-art processing capabilities to improve company performance and our customer-centric offerings. This will be across Motor, Home and Commercial Lines businesses. Key Responsibilities: Be the technical lead in the development of predictive models that solve business challenges through one-off analyses or bespoke modelling. Such work would include: Risk classification, such as area or vehicle classification Development of models for new products or specialised risks, such as pet insurance Testing of innovative predictive modelling techniques, such as automated interaction detection or the automatic smoothing of linear model trends using GAMs The development and maintenance of predictive models for application and claims fraud, and claims handling processes Be involved in the development and testing of state-of-the-art hyper-parameter tuning methods and drive efficiency in the tuning of standard machine learning processes. Work collaboratively with the data and pricing teams to identify solutions to wider modelling challenges Use a wide range of data science and statistical techniques Adapt known machine learning techniques to create solutions/models that are state-of-the-art and go beyond business requirements Research and leverage new and existing internal and/or external data sources Communicate results to key decision makers across the business Assist in the deployment and monitoring effort to ensure efficient productisation of the solutions created Key Skills and Experience: D. or masters in statistics, data science or equivalent field Minimum of 5 years’ experience within data science Experience and detailed technical knowledge of GLMs /Elastic Nets, GBMs, GAMs, Random Forests, and clustering techniques Experience in programming languages (e.g. Python, PySpark, R, SAS, SQL) Proficient at communicating results in a concise manner both verbally and written Behaviours: Motivated by technical excellence Team player Self-motivated with a drive to learn and develop Logical thinker with a professional and positive attitude Passion to innovate and improve processes Personality and a sense of humour