Lead Machine Learning Scientist, Search

Monzo is recruiting a Lead Machine Learning Scientist for its Search team, which is working on the Monzo Co-pilot. The Co-pilot is meant to be a proactive assistant that helps customers manage their finances, anticipates their needs and points them to the right products or answers at the right moment. The role can be based in London or carried out remotely within the UK, with occasional London meetings. The posting gives a salary of £115,000 to £150,000 plus incentive awards and benefits.

The lead would create and release models that let customers look up answers about their money. Examples in the posting include surfacing a relevant savings product at the right moment, helping customers manage spending, and simplifying financial planning. Possible techniques include user and product embeddings, contextual bandits for real-time decisions, and personalised ranking for search and discovery. The lead would also design AI systems that scale, can be explained and are responsible, and would be expected to justify and demonstrate how well each approach works. The data platform holds billions of rows and supports models used by more than 15 million customers.

Colleagues on the team include backend engineers, product managers, ML scientists and data scientists. The role combines technical leadership with hands-on individual contribution, so the lead would steer technical choices and encourage experimentation. The posting asks for a multi-year record of leading advanced machine learning models in production, ideally in a fast-moving technology company, and ownership of the path from a business problem to a measurable result.

Applicants should be fluent in Python and have deep practical experience with scikit-learn. SQL is needed, and interest in learning Go is desirable because it is used in backend microservices. Candidates should explain machine learning ideas to non-specialists and work comfortably with uncertainty. Experience with personalisation, ranking or recommendation for consumer apps, and experience with production microservices, are listed as nice to have. The interview process has a 30-minute recruiter call, a 45-minute call with the hiring manager and a full loop covering ML modelling, product and ML, behavioural and leadership interviews, usually over three to four weeks.