Data Science and AI Lead in London

Elliptic is the leader in digital asset decisioning, having built the most comprehensive platform for efficiently extracting crypto data and intelligence across blockchains with the greatest accuracy. Our platform's unrivalled uptime, scalability, depth and breadth of our data and intelligence means exacting organizations choose Elliptic for their compliance, risk management, intelligence operations and blockchain infrastructure needs.

Do you want to lead a data science team on a problem the industry has not solved yet, while still writing code yourself? Are you excited about building the data foundation for how compliance works when the customer is an autonomous agent rather than a person? You will lead data science inside Elliptic's Intelligence team, alongside Intelligence Collection, Research and Investigations, and Professional Services. At first, you will lead a small team of data scientists and are expected to own the team's direction, performance and growth. You will own the evidence for the models your team builds and represent them at Elliptic's model risk governance forum. This is not a compliance tax bolted onto the technical work: it is the reason institutions trust our outputs.

The reason we are hiring a lead as we add more data scientists is that a small team working on an unsolved problem needs someone who intrinsically understands the domain, not a layer of management above it. Set objectives with your data scientists in the context of company strategy, own their performance and development, and be the manager who has the difficult conversation rather than deferring it. Level the team against Elliptic's Intelligence career framework and build real development paths.

Hire the next data scientists. Build the collection for the future of compliance. Take it from a directive to a specification to delivered data: define what good looks like, sequence the work, set the quality bar, and be honest about what the dataset does and does not support. Keep the model inventory current and correctly tiered, ensure validation and testing evidence exists at the standard each tier requires, monitor for drift and act on threshold breaches, and submit material changes and production deployments for review with the testing artefacts attached. Lead Elliptic's data science work. Bring that view to Intelligence leadership, the Chief Scientist and Product as a recommendation rather than as an open question.

Partner with Intelligence Collection, Collection Engineering, Research and Investigations, the Chief Scientist, Product and Engineering, so that data science work lands as platform capability rather than as analysis nobody uses. Set the AI working standard for the team. Decide how your team uses AI in its engineering and research workflow, what must be verified and how, and hold the team to it. The collection plan delivered at a scale that supports real model or heuristic work, with a documented path to maintaining it. At least one data science hire made, and the existing levelled against the career framework with development plans in place.

Model governance in good standing for everything your team owns: inventory current and correctly tiered, no overdue validations on the highest tiers, monitoring in place with acted-upon thresholds, and no open issues past their remediation deadline. Data science objectives for Intelligence agreed and delivering, with other functions able to state what they can expect from the team and when. Treat governance as part of building good models rather than as paperwork that follows them, and would rather surface a problem with your own model than have someone else find it. Care about the mission of using intelligence to fight financial crime and protect the global financial system.

Our ideal candidate has:

• AI fluency, which is essential for this role. You must be able to demonstrate how you apply AI tools and approaches within a data science workflow: writing and debugging code, exploring unfamiliar data, accelerating pipeline and model work, and automating repetitive tasks.
• Demonstrated experience managing data scientists or machine learning engineers: setting objectives, owning performance including underperformance, and developing people.
• Deep, hands-on data science and machine learning capability that is current.
• Strong Python and SQL, and the ability to interrogate large behavioural or transactional datasets yourself and defend your method under challenge.
• Experience with a modern data stack comparable to ours: a cloud data lake, Spark or Databricks, and AWS.

Bonus Points for:

• Work on agentic systems, LLM agents or autonomous transaction flows, whether in compliance, payments, fraud or infrastructure.
• Experience building a large dataset or collection from nothing, including the unglamorous parts: schema decisions, quality checks, and maintenance.
• Blockchain or on-chain data experience: clustering, attribution, heuristics, anomaly detection, mempool analysis, or research into privacy preserving systems.
• Experience in payments, fraud or risk data science, where the cost of a false negative is commercial rather than academic.
• A PhD or equivalent research training, or a record of published applied research.
• Experience in a regulated environment or with model risk management frameworks, whether in financial services, or as a vendor to it, or in another domain with equivalent assurance requirements.

Hybrid working and the option to work from almost anywhere for up to 90 days per year. Remote working budget to set up your home office space. Learning & Development: $1,000 Learning & Development budget to use on anything (agreed with your manager) that contributes to your growth and development. Vacation/Leave: Holidays: 25 days of annual leave + bank holidays. An extra day for your birthday. Enhanced parental leave: we provide eligible employees, regardless of gender or whether they become a parent by birth or adoption, 16 weeks fully-paid leave and leave. Benefits: Private Health Insurance - we use Bupa! Full access to Spill Mental Health Support. Life Assurance: we hope you will never need this - but our cover is for 4 times your salary to your beneficiaries. Cycle to Work Scheme. We know Diversity and Inclusion is much deeper than just hiring, but it's important for us to mention it here. We believe our diverse team of individuals underpins this by bringing creative thinking and innovation to Elliptic every day.