Senior Analyst

Role Purpose:

• Shop Direct wishes to be a world class leader in the application of artificial intelligence (A.I.) to financial customer behaviour profiling. This is a critical role within a growing area of decisioning excellence at Shop Direct, seeking to utilise fully automated processes reliant upon leading edge modelling and decision capabilities.
• Use the latest and most advanced techniques and data sources - support vector machines, random forests, and neural networks - to segment our portfolio, assess creditworthiness, and optimize decision making.
• Use non-traditional Big Data sources such as website transactional data, social media data, and unstructured data sources.
• Has responsibility for the development and implementation of machine learning solutions across the £1.5bn Shop Direct Financial Services (SDFS) portfolio.
• To leverage the application of machine learning and A.I (artificial intelligence) to optimise risk decisioning and profitability across the SDFS portfolio.
• To provide portfolio insight using machine learning techniques.
• To develop and educate team members in machine learning techniques and their application.

Scope of Role:

• Has responsibility for the development and implementation of machine learning across the £1.5bn SDFS portfolio.
• Provide effective machine learning development, implementation, controls and monitoring for the portfolio exposures of circa £8bn, across acquisition, account management, fraud and collections.

Key Responsibilities / Projects:

Machine learning and A.I. (artificial intelligence)

• Develop machine learning and A.I. (artificial intelligence) models and analytical solutions to optimise risk decisioning and profitability across the portfolio.
• Identify appropriate opportunities to apply machine learning.
• Create value from a variety of data sources, including web transactional data and unstructured data sources.
• Project manage the implementation of machine learning models.
• Ensure models are optimised and regularly monitored for degradation.
• Ensure effective model governance routines are developed and documented.
• Leverage machine learning approaches to increase efficiencies across SDFS.
• Expand the team’s capabilities in machine learning and A.I.

Key Relationships:

• Head of FS Decision Analytics (line manager)
• Credit Risk Managers and Senior Managers
• Business-wide analytical community
• Credit Risk & Operations Director

Essential Knowledge, Skills, Experience or Role Specific Qualifications required:

• Science or Mathematics based degree with good knowledge of statistics.
• 1 yrs+ profession experience of modelling and statistical techniques for machine learning
• 1 yrs+ experience of deployment of machine learning algorithms in a business environment, including project management.
• Experience of working with large volumes of data (transactional, Weblogs), including data preparation and pre-processing.
• Proven ability to deliver analytical solutions in challenging environments, either commercial or research based.
• Strong analytical abilities
• Ability to simplify complex concepts for non-technical audiences.
• Experience of using either SAS, Python or R within a commercial environment.

Preferred:

• A Master level qualification in a relevant field e.g. maths or computer science
• A further qualification in machine learning or data science.
• Experience of developing and deploying machine learning models within a retail or credit business.
• Experience of subprime portfolio
• Experience of working in a fast-paced environment.
• Experience of running champion-challenger models and tests.

Excellent knowledge of machine learning tools, techniques, databases and decisioning packages e.g.: SAS Enterprise Miner, SAS Visual Analytics, R/Python, SQL, NoSQL, Teradata, Hadoop, Cassandra, Excel (Advanced), Tableau.