Data Scientist - CONTRACT

Contract - Outside IR35 - Start ASAP

Location: Remote UK/Europe

Yaspa started in 2017 as ‘Citizen’, a company with the vision of connecting identity and payments. Over the years our product offering has evolved, but that focus has remained the same. We believe there is a sweet spot in the combination of payment and identity data that will dramatically improve payment velocity, security and consumer trust. We use open banking to power real-time payments and instant verification.

The Role

We are seeking a skilled data scientist to contribute to our Intelligent Payments platform, powered by open banking. Your role will involve developing a Machine Learning product that analyses customers’ transactional data (provided with their consent) to generate insights based on their spending patterns. These insights will be applied across sectors like loans for risk management and IGaming for managing customer spending behaviours. You will play a crucial role in our transition from a payment‑focused business to one that leverages AI and machine learning to better understand our customers.

Key Responsibilities

• You will use Python, with a strong grounding in feature engineering, model evaluation, and inference pipelines to help shape the future of our product offerings.
• Act as a subject matter expert in Analytics: Strong understanding of statistics, experimental design, and hypothesis testing to identify trends and patterns, and develop predictive models.
• Design and deploy Agentic AI systems capable of autonomous, multi‑step reasoning, e.g. such as agents that categorise financial transactions by searching for merchant information, applying labels, and surfacing confidence scores with transparent reasoning.
• Lead data labeling at scale to produce ground‑truth datasets and use ML techniques to maximise labelling efficiency.
• Build AI agents that integrate with external tools and data sources via protocols such as MCP, enabling LLMs to interact directly with codebases, APIs, or internal systems to automate complex workflows.
• Lead model deployment with an eye for performance, scalability, and real‑time low‑latency inference.
• Deliver robust, low‑failure‑rate models and systems, especially in environments where testing support is limited.
• Collaborative Problem Solving: Work closely with cross‑functional teams, including product, engineering, and business stakeholders, to understand requirements and deliver data‑driven solutions.
• Enthusiasm for collaborating across disciplines, including with academic researchers and third‑party partners.

What We’re Looking For

Required skills:

• Hands‑on experience building and deploying ML models in Python.
• SQL skills and familiarity with AWS for deployment and data workflows.
• Strong knowledge of statistical modeling, anomaly detection, clustering, and supervised/unsupervised learning.
• Hands‑on experience with agentic AI frameworks (e.g. Claude with MCP, LangChain); experience in either transaction enrichment workflows or AI‑assisted software development tooling is sufficient.
• Experience working with large‑scale tabular data.
• Proven success collaborating with product and engineering teams to ship ML‑based features and tools.
• Strong communication skills and business acumen to present complex technical ideas to non‑technical stakeholders.
• Curious, proactive, and comfortable working in ambiguity in a scaling startup environment.

Nice to Have:

• Demonstrated ability to design and validate features using transactional and behavioural data from financial services.
• Proven track record in payment risk, fraud detection, or credit decisioning is strongly preferred.
• Experience with model governance and monitoring in regulated environments.
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure), preferably AWS, ML tools such as the AWS suite: Sagemaker.

Working with Yaspa

We are a fun, collaborative team based in London (though many of us work remotely for part of the week). Benefits of working with us include:

• A strong focus on culture - We’re a friendly bunch who work hard and support each other; if you’re excited by personal and professional growth, and being able to really make your mark, then this is the place for you!
• Flexible hours and hybrid working - We are in the office 2 to 3 days a week where we collaborate and learn from each other. This is matched by the balance of WFH to allow you to manage your days autonomously.
• Top tech - you’ll be given a MacBook to work from when you join!
• WFH set‑up allowance - Along with your new laptop, we will also provide you an allowance so you can get your perfect set up sorted.
• Quarterly socials - The Yaspa team is fun and curious, so we make sure we get together to go‑kart, throw darts, play board games and generally enjoy ourselves!
• Generous holiday allowance - As well as all the UK public bank holidays, you get 28 days of holiday to enjoy and take as you’d like.
• 3% pension contribution, which we hope to increase in 2026 as we hit various revenue milestones.
• 24/7 GP virtual GP access.
• Physio & Well‑being support through our healthcare partner Health Hero.
• Individual L&D budget to support career development.
• A number of enhanced policies outside of the statutory requirements.

Note: We cannot offer Visa sponsorship. We’re not working with external agencies at this current time.

Please note that as an equal opportunities employer, Yaspa is committed to the equal treatment of all current and prospective employees and does not condone discrimination on the basis of age, disability, sex, sexual orientation, pregnancy and maternity, race or ethnicity, religion or belief, gender identity, or marriage and civil partnership. We aspire to have a diverse and inclusive workplace and strongly encourage suitably qualified applicants from a wide range of backgrounds to apply and join Yaspa.