Data Science Chief of Staff

About Abound

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.

And we've shown it works at scale. We’ve issued over £1.3bn in loans directly to customers while delivering market-leading credit performance - for every 10 defaults the industry expects, we see only 3. We also reached profitability just 2.5 years after launch.

Backed by £2bn+ of funding from top-tier investors including Citi, GSR Ventures, and Deutsche Bank, we’re recognised as one of Europe’s fastest-growing fintechs (Sifted, CNBC). Now, we’re expanding into new markets and product lines - and we’re looking for ambitious people who want to learn fast, take ownership, and grow with us.

About the role

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)

What you'll be doing

Execution & follow-through

• 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

Model & system health

• 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

Operating cadence

• 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

Cross-team execution

• 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

Organisation

• 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

DS Director leverage

• 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

Who you are

• 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.

What we offer

• Everyone owns a piece of the company - equity

• Hybrid with 3 days a week in the office

• 25 days' holiday a year, plus 8 bank holidays

• 2 paid volunteering days per year

• One month paid sabbatical after 4 years

• Employee loan

• Free gym membership

• Team wellness budget to be active together - set up a yoga class, a tennis lesson or go bouldering