Junior Data Scientist - Fraud & AML Monitoring

Junior Data Scientist - Fraud & AML Monitoring

At M&G, our purpose is to give everyone real confidence to put their money to work. With a heritage dating back more than 175 years, we have a long history of innovation in savings and investments, combining asset management and insurance expertise to offer a wide range of solutions.

Our two distinct operating segments, Asset Management and Life, work together to provide access to balanced, long-term investment and savings solutions.

Through telling it like it is, owning it now and moving it forward together with care and integrity; we are creating an exceptional place to work for exceptional talent.

We will consider flexible working arrangements for any of our roles and offer workplace adjustments to ensure you have the support you need to succeed in your role.

About the Role

This is an outstanding opportunity to join the Fraud Monitoring and Analysis team within M&G’s Operational Planning Centre of Excellence. The role is open to graduates, career starters, and internal colleagues who are looking to build or develop a career in Data Science, Analytics, and Financial Crime.

You do not need to be a fully‑formed expert. Instead, we are looking for someone with a strong natural aptitude for data, a solid technical foundation and an intuitive ability to use data for real-world insights to prevent financial crime by identifying risks early on. You will receive excellent support, mentoring, and exposure to modern cloud‑based architectures, whilst working on fraud and AML challenges.

The team is a key part of M&G’s Financial Crime Enhancement Programme, a major transformation initiative bringing significant change, expansion, and opportunities to collaborate with multiple teams across the business.

Why This Role Is a Fantastic Career Opportunity

• Ideal for graduates or first‑time data scientists
• Excellent technical development and upskilling support
• Strong opportunity for internal colleagues looking to reskill or progress
• Broad exposure to fraud, AML, technology, operations, and senior stakeholders
• High visibility role offering excellent networking opportunities
• Opportunity to work within a recognised Centre of Excellence
• Exposure to large‑scale change and transformation initiatives

What You’ll Be Doing

• Working across the full solution lifecycle, you will:
  • Design and build solutions that enable the delivery of fraud and anti-money laundering monitoring capability across our business
  • Be the team expert on Azure Databricks, and support other team members in upskilling in this area
  • Be the team expert on Power BI, and support other team members in upskilling in this area
  • Support the teams wider activities, assisting in investigation of suspicious transactions from a data standpoint
  • Understand how complex data sources connect, to build in automation and to develop a capability to successfully isolate suspicious transactions and behaviours
  • Seek out new sources of data, which can be linked to online/offline transactional or customer data to provide new or enhanced insight to the business
  • Understand and review how other parts of the business are using data and data tools to see how we can learn, evolve and align
  • Build scalable and repeatable solutions that can be introduced in new areas/journeys/products, in line with our focus on building a centre of excellence
  • Conduct ongoing data quality assessments to ensure the necessary data is continuously ingested into the appropriate tools/applications that facilitate our transaction monitoring capabilities. This also includes the assessment of the accuracy of the data
  • Joining data from multiple sources (Data modelling)
  • This is an individual contributor profile wherein the candidate is required to work in collaboration with the team Design and build systems that mine massive datasets and structure/ engineer it to be usable
  • As part of a Centre of Excellence, you will help develop best practice that can be shared across M&G.

What We’re Looking For

• A strong interest in data, analytics, and financial crime
• Proven experience translating business problems into analytical solutions
• Confidence working with Fraud, Compliance, Technology, and Operations teams
• Strong communication skills to explain data‑driven insights clearly to both technical and non‑technical audiences
• A collaborative approach and enthusiasm for working with stakeholders
• An analytical mindset with attention to data quality and accuracy

Proficiency in:

• The Azure ecosystem, including:
  • Azure Databricks
  • Azure Data Factory
  • Azure DevOps
• Distributed data processing using Spark clusters
• Python for data analysis and modelling; comfort with command-line tools
• SQL for querying and data manipulation
• Power BI and/or Tableau for reporting and insight generation
• Working with automated, cloud‑based data pipelines
• Must be able to connect our data sets in a way that provides an end to end view of the customer journey, and in turn, helps to identify and mitigate fraudulent or suspicious activities.
• Must be able to perform ETL tasks, logical/physical data modelling

If you’re looking for a role that offers technical depth, structured development, business exposure, and long‑term career potential, this is an excellent opportunity to start or grow your career at M&G.

Location

Location: Edinburgh or Stirling

Internal_job_title

(The internal job title for this role is Fraud & AML Monitoring Data Scientist)

What we offer:

• A valuable pension scheme of up to 18% (13% made up of employer contributions and 5% employee contributions).
• Access to our Share Save and Share Incentive Plan, alongside financial wellbeing and support services to help give you real confidence to put your money to work.
• Enjoy 38 days annual leave (including bank holidays), with the opportunity to purchase up to five extra days. Our Time Off When You Need It policy gives you the flexibility - to balance work and personal commitments.
• Our market-leading Inspiring Families policy includes comprehensive support and paid parental leave covering maternity, adoption, surrogacy, and paternity leave - because supporting families is an important part of our inclusive culture.
• Health & Protection cover includes Private Healthcare, Critical Illness cover and Life Assurance for you, with additional family options - for peace of mind.

To explore more about life at M&G and our full benefits offering, visit Life at M&G

At M&G we strive to have a diverse workforce and an inclusive culture, underpinned by our policies and employee‑led networks that offer networking, support and development opportunities for the diverse communities our colleagues represent. We welcome applications from people of all backgrounds – across gender, ethnicity, age, disability, sexual orientation and more – including neurodivergent individuals, career returners and those with military service experience.

M&G is proud to be Level 3: Disability Confident Leader under the UK Government Disability Confident employer scheme, and we welcome applications from candidates with disabilities and long‑term health conditions. If you would like to participate in the initiative, you will have the opportunity to indicate this on your application.

We are committed to providing an inclusive recruitment process. All candidates have the opportunity to request reasonable adjustments when applying. If you need any additional support at any stage, please contact us at: careers@mandg.com