Data Scientist Manager in London

Mastercard powers economies and empowers people in 200+ countries and territories worldwide. Together with our customers, we’re helping build a sustainable economy where everyone can prosper. We support a wide range of digital payments choices, making transactions secure, simple, smart and accessible. Our technology and innovation, partnerships and networks combine to deliver a unique set of products and services that help people, businesses and governments realize their greatest potential.

In the Financial Crime Solutions team at Mastercard, we build and deliver products and services powered by payments data to find and stop financial crime. We’re an award‑winning team with a proven track record of combining data‑science techniques with an intimate knowledge of payments data to aid financial institutions in their fight against money laundering and fraud. Headquartered in The City of London and operating globally, we craft bespoke algorithms that help our clients gain an understanding of the underlying criminal behaviour that drives financial crime, empowering them to take action.

Responsibilities

• Directly contribute to project delivery—writing code, reviewing code, delivering ML models and analytics, and managing a team to engage with Product and Engineering counterparts on specific products or series of projects.
• Perform proof‑of‑concept projects, engage in product design and build prototypes.
• Use the full range of data‑science techniques to develop new and novel algorithms to aid existing and new financial crime products.
• Perform novel research to help us and our clients understand different criminal behaviours in payments data.
• Translate derived insights into new products and services for external clients.
• Learn new technologies as required and engage with legacy and future technology stacks, in the UK and internationally.
• Write white papers, patents, and client‑facing data visualisations.
• Consider the full impact of your work, taking into account privacy, security, regulation, performance of your code and the accuracy of your models.

Qualifications

• High‑standard Python coding skills and familiarity with standard data‑science libraries such as pandas, scikit‑learn, xgboost, and networkx.
• Ability to develop new algorithms in novel situations and demonstration of prior work.
• Strong interest in modelling the behaviours exposed by the data we work with.
• Excellent communication skills with non‑technical colleagues, comfortable putting yourself in others’ shoes.
• Excited to explore new programming languages, technologies, and techniques.
• A can‑do attitude, pragmatism, and willingness to engage in constructive criticism and code reviews.

Desirable Experience

• Practical experience with streaming technologies (e.g., Kafka), online algorithms (e.g., stochastic gradient descent), and fixed‑memory data structures (e.g., Bloom Filters).
• Experience with next‑generation machine‑learning techniques and tools such as Deep Neural Networks and TensorFlow.
• Exposure to Network Theory, especially social network analysis and graph diffusion analysis.
• Ability to build custom data visualisations, prototype browser‑based UX/UI, and server‑side microservices to support them.
• Specific experience in Account‑to‑Account payments, Card Payments, or the broader payments industry.

Information Security Responsibility

• Abide by Mastercard’s security policies and practices.
• Ensure the confidentiality and integrity of the information being accessed.
• Report any suspected information security violation or breach.
• Complete all periodic mandatory security trainings in accordance with Mastercard’s guidelines.