Job Title: Data Scientist
Location: London / Leicester / Bexhill
Welcome to Hastings Direct
We’re a digital insurance provider with a clear strategy to become the best and biggest player in the UK market. As a company, we’ve made huge investments in our technology, pricing, data and analytics capabilities over the past few years, along with nurturing our 4Cs culture and substantial investment in our people. And as a Finance team, we're doing exactly the same – building a market leading finance technology platform, investing in our team and our approach to leadership development, with a real focus on commercially adding value to the business.
The fact you’re now reading this job advert means we’ve tempted you to find out more about #lifeatHD. If you like what you see, we hope you'll consider joining our team.
We have high standards and understand some people may not apply for jobs unless they feel they tick every box. If you’re excited about joining us and think you have some of what we are looking for, even if you’re not 100% sure, we would love to hear from you.
Role overview
Retail Pricing are responsible for developing and delivering Hastings’ street pricing strategy, driving commercial performance whilst ensuring fair customer outcomes. The team of pricing, data science and analytics experts set prices that maximise the value generated through customer acquisition and retention by using advanced machine learning, statistical and optimisation techniques to model both customer behaviour and the dynamic, highly competitive UK price comparison market Hastings operates in.
Data Scientists are critical members of that team, working with extensive, diverse datasets to build predictive models and deploy those to enhance our price optimisation algorithms.
Job details
Querying our data warehouses to extract modelling data, create new features and analyse the performance of price optimisations and tests
Building machine learning and statistical models to predict the market and customer behaviour, deploying them to enhance our pricing
Using and developing our pricing algorithm to deliver new price optimisations and tests
To achieve this you will need to:
Be a fast learner to understand our business, its value drivers and the data it generates
Have a customer focus to both spot profit opportunities and do the right thing
Think creatively to master and combine machine learning and statistical approaches
Love sharing your ideas and storytelling to engage and enthuse our stakeholders
Document your work and build pipelines to automate it
Essential skills/experience:
Degree (Masters preferred) in a numerical discipline (e.g. mathematics, sciences, engineering, computing)
SQL and experience working with large or complex datasets
R/Python/Matlab or coding statistical methods in other languages
Building classification and/or regression models (e.g. GLMs)
Knowledge of supervised or unsupervised machine learning techniques
Desirable
experience working in an analytical, modelling or data science role
Insurance industry/actuarial experience
Hyper-parameter tuning of machine learning models
Practicalities of deploying models into production environments (e.g. XML, POJO, PMML)
Knowledge of version control and automation tools (e.g. GIT, Jenkins)
The interview process:
Our interview process involves the below:
Recruiter screening call
1st stage interview with hiring leader
2nd Technical interview Panel format
As a Disability Confident employer, we’re committed to ensuring our recruitment processes are fully inclusive – what this means to you is if you’re applying for a job with us, you’ll have fair access to support and adjustments throughout your recruitment journey. We also welcome applications through the Disability Confident Scheme (DCS).For more information on the DCS, please visit our inclusive business page on our careers website
Benefits: In addition to a competitive salary you will also receive…
Flexible working – we champion a flexible hybrid working approach – please speak to your recruiter to discuss in more detail
Competitive bonus scheme - all colleagues are eligible for our annual 4Cs performance bonus
Financial wellbeing – as well as providing you with 4x your salary with our life assurance cover, income protection at no extra cost, and matched pension contributions up to 10%, we are proud to provide you with an award winning package which includes – discounts, cashback, free independent mortgage advice and free access to financial wellbeing support
Mental wellbeing programme – we have the thrive mental health app, our colleague assistance programme available 24/7, our own in-house mental health first aiders, support groups and a dedicated team to make sure we are covering your needs
There's more! – 25 days annual leave + bank holidays, with the option to buy or sell one of your weeks, access to our health care cash back plans, dental plans, discounted health assessments, Cycle to work and tech schemes, discounted and free onsite facilities, social events throughout the year and much more ….
Join us and you’ll find a different way of doing things. We call it the 4Cs. We focus on getting it right for our colleagues, customers, company and community. As one of our colleagues, you’ll be helping to drive our growth, so in return, we’ll give you all the support, training and development you need. Our 4Cs principles are simple: we believe by creating the right culture for our colleagues and giving them the right tools to do their job, we’ll deliver good outcomes for every customer, helping us to grow the company profitably and sustainably and allowing us to invest in the communities we serve.
At Hastings Direct, we’re committed to creating an inclusive environment where everyone has the opportunity to succeed. If you require any reasonable adjustments during the recruitment process, we encourage you to be open with us. Our recruitment team is here to provide the support you need to ensure a fair and accessible experience for all.
Job posting end date:
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What We Do
Hastings Group is a fast growing, agile, digitally focused general insurance provider providing services to the UK car, van, bike and home insurance market. Big enough to compete but small enough to grow, the Group has strong relationships with all major price comparison websites, a cost effective digital marketing model and a focus on customer retention.
Hastings provides refreshingly straightforward products and services to UK car, bike, van and home insurance customers.
A multi-award winning business, Hastings has over 2.7 million customers and over 3,400 colleagues.
The Group operates as an integrated insurance provider with two businesses. The Group’s Retail business, Hastings Insurance Services Limited, is responsible for the end customer pricing, fraud management, product design, distribution and management of the underlying customer relationships. The Group’s Underwriting business, Advantage Insurance Company Limited, engages in risk selection, underlying technical pricing, reserving and claims handling.
Retail is supported by, and benefits from, Underwriting’s prudent approach to risk and reserving and also benefits from the Group’s panel of insurance partners who provide additional underwriting capacity. The Group’s integrated model deliberately separates underlying product manufacturing from its distribution.
