Job title: Senior Data Scientist

Locations: Manchester or Haywards Heath (hybrid working)

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.

Role overview

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 pricing and classification and regression models

Identify and create data solutions that create value

Work collaboratively with the pricing, retail and machine learning 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

Identify and create solutions that leverage vast data assets and lead the development of bespoke machine-learning models to improve the underwriting performance of the Group.

Key Responsibilities:

Develop and test modelling improvements for pricing models, particularly in motor. These might include improvements in hyper-parameter tuning methods, model performance, model stability and feature explainability

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, as well as predictive models for other business use cases such as conversion or retention

Adapt known machine learning techniques such as GBMs to create solutions/models that are state-of-the-art and go beyond business requirements

Work collaboratively with other teams to identify improvements to risk modelling and wider business challenges

Use a wide range of data science and statistical techniques

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:

PhD. or masters in statistics, data science or equivalent field

Previous experience within data science

Experience in commercial pricing and modelling, ideally with a focus in Motor

Experience and detailed technical knowledge of GLMs /Elastic Nets, GBMs, GAMs, Random Forests, and clustering techniques

Experience in programming (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