Data Science Chief Of Staff

We’re redefining consumer lending in the UK, and beyond. Using advanced AI and Open Banking data, we make fair, affordable personal finance available to more people. While traditional lenders rely almost entirely on credit scores, we look at the full financial picture - how much you spend, and what you can afford to repay to build a deeper, more accurate understanding of each customer's unique financial situation.

We are hiring a Chief of Staff to act as the DS Director's right hand, with full visibility across a fast-scaling Data Science and Credit Risk organisation that builds and runs the decisioning, pricing and credit models behind every Abound product - across multiple verticals and markets.

This is a high-impact role for someone early in their career who is exceptionally curious and operates with real autonomy. You won't be handed a playbook. You'll be handed context, access and a mandate - and trusted to figure out the rest.

Your mission is simple: make sure that the DS and Risk team is

• working on the right business priorities, and understanding the business impact

• delivering at pace without introducing unnecessary bureaucracy

• operating with great discipline and consistency (incl. change controls, reporting and communication)

• Maintain the single trusted view of all DS and Risk work across product verticals: status, owners, risks, dependencies

• Chase blockers, connect people who should be talking, and make sure commitments actually land

• Surface problems early and drive them to fast resolution

• Build and run the monitoring layer across our model estate: performance drift, stability, data quality, alerting

• Define and run the rituals that catch problems early: model health reviews, incident follow-ups, documentation checks

• Coordinate model deployments and bug fixes, and monitor the health of our services and decisioning APIs day to day

• Dig into anomalies yourself first, then pull in the director or senior scientists when a judgment call is needed

• Run the core operating rhythm of the DS organisation: planning cycles, delivery reviews, team learning forums

• Manage the change control process, including

  • make sure senior stakeholders (e.g. DS Director, Head of Credit Risk, CRO) explicitly approve material changes to decisioning models

  • monitor post-change impact vs. expectation by working with the team

• Prepare crisp, decision-ready material for the DS Director, the CRO and exec team

• Manage dependencies across DS verticals, credit risk, engineering, product and compliance

• Help run prioritisation so trade-offs across products are made deliberately, not by accident

• Run the DS hiring engine end to end: pipeline tracking, interview quality, and onboarding that gets new joiners productive fast

• Help scale the team's knowledge sharing, documentation and ways of working

• Support the performance management process

• Reduce the Director's overhead on coordination, tracking and follow-up

• Create space for focus on credit strategy, model innovation and the team

• Be a thought partner on whatever matters most that month

• 2-4 years in a quantitative, analytical or operational role - data science, analytics, management consulting, fintech, or similar

• Ideally, someone who managed projects end-to-end, e.g. an engagement manager in a consulting firm

• Genuinely curious about how lending and credit models work: you don't need to have built one, but you'll want to understand ours, and you're comfortable enough in SQL/Python to look at the data yourself

• Demonstrably autonomous: you can point to things you started, built or fixed without being asked

• Ruthlessly organised and a clear writer: you turn chaos into structure and never drop a thread

• Low ego, high ownership: equally happy presenting to the exec team and fixing an interview scheduling mix-up

You are curious but structured, ambitious but humble. You earn authority by being consistently right and useful, not by title.