Lead Machine Learning Scientist, Search

Our ML Search team brings together Backend, Product, Machine Learning Scientists and Data Scientists. As a Lead Machine Learning Scientist, you’ll build and ship models that help customers search for and find answers about their financial lives. You'll make it effortless for them to find the right products at the exact moment they need them.

Whether it’s surfacing the right savings product at the perfect moment, helping customers manage their spending, or simplifying financial planning, our work makes banking smarter, more intuitive, and truly customer-first.

WHAT YOU’LL BE WORKING ON:

As a Lead Machine Learning Scientist, you'll be a technical leader and individual contributor. We have a modern, cloud-native data platform with billions of rows of data built for fast iterations. You'll leverage your deep expertise to develop and deploy advanced ML models to our more than 15 million customers.

Your work may involve user and product embeddings to better understand customer behaviours, contextual bandits for optimising real-time decisions, or personalised ranking algorithms that improve search and discovery. You'll also build scalable, explainable, and responsible AI solutions that enhance trust, transparency, and the overall customer experience.

The technical approaches you take to help solve customer problems will be very much in your hands and we’ll strongly encourage and support experimentation and innovation. We’ll be expecting you to justify and demonstrate effectiveness along the way, making sure the approach meets our business and customer needs.

YOU SHOULD APPLY IF:

What we’re doing here at Monzo excites you!

• You have a multiple year track record of excellence leading the development and deployment of advanced Machine Learning models to tackle real business problems preferably in a fast moving tech company
• You have experience developing and shipping state of the art ML models to production and delivering business impact
• You're impact driven and excited to own the end to end journey that starts with a business problem and ends with your solution having a measurable impact in production
• You have a self-starter mindset; you proactively identify issues and opportunities and tackle them without being told to do so
• You speak Python fluently and have extensive, hands-on experience with scikit-learn. You are comfortable using SQL, and keen to learn Go lang which is used in many of our backend microservices
• You’re comfortable working in a team that deals with ambiguity and have experience helping your team and stakeholders resolve that ambiguity
• You want to be involved in building a product that you (and the people you know) use every day
• You have a product mindset: you care about customer outcomes and you want to make data-informed decisions
• You're excited about fast-moving developments in Machine Learning and can communicate those ideas to colleagues who are not familiar with the domain
• You’re adaptable, curious and enjoy learning new technologies and ideas

NICE TO HAVES:

• Experience working on personalisation, ranking & recommendation problems for consumer applications
• Commercial experience writing critical production code and working with microservices

THE INTERVIEW PROCESS:

Our interview process involves 3 main stages. We promise not to ask you any brain teasers or trick questions!

30 minute recruiter call

45 minute call with hiring manager

Full Loop: ML Modelling Interview, Product & ML interview, Behavioural Interview, Leadership interview

Our average process takes around 3-4 weeks but we will always work around your availability.

WHAT’S IN IT FOR YOU:

✈️ We can help you relocate to the UK

✅ We can sponsor visas

📍This role can be based in our London office, but we're open to distributed working within the UK (with ad hoc meetings in London).

⏰ We offer flexible working hours and trust you to work enough hours to do your job well, at times that suit you and your team.

📚Learning budget of £1,000 a year for training courses and conferences

➕And much more, see our full list of benefits here

If you prefer to work part-time, we'll make this happen whenever we can - whether this is to help you meet other commitments or strike a great work-life balance

#LI-REMOTE #LI-SR1

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Equal opportunities for everyone

Diversity and inclusion are a priority for us and we’re making sure we have lots of support for all of our people to grow at Monzo. At Monzo, we’re embracing diversity by fostering an inclusive environment for all people to do the best work of their lives with us. This is integral to our mission of making money work for everyone. You can read more in our blog, 2026 Diversity and Inclusion Report and 2025 Gender Pay Gap Report.

We’re an equal opportunity employer. All applicants will be considered for employment without attention to age, ethnicity, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, family or parental status, national origin, or veteran, neurodiversity or disability status.

If you have a preferred name, please use it to apply. We don't need full or birth names at application stage 😊