Senior Data Scientist - Telematics

About the Team

We don't build pricing models, we build the driving intelligence that feeds them. Our mission is fairer insurance, priced on how people drive, not on who they are, and safer roads.

The Telematics team turns raw phone sensor data into meaningful signals about how people drive. Using signal processing and machine learning on high-frequency GPS, accelerometer, and gyroscope data, we extract the behavioural features that power Zego's understanding of driving quality, context, and risk.

The Telematics Data Science team collaborates daily with engineering, product, and actuarial colleagues across the UK and PT. We're one team across Portugal and the UK. PT and UK roles carry the same scope, ownership, and progression. Decisions get made where the work happens, not in a single headquarters. This isn't a solo remote seat; you'll join an established team of peers.

About the Role

Few teams use phone sensor data to price commercial motor insurance at scale. As a Senior Data Scientist, you'll shape how millions of trips are turned into risk signals. You'll own behavioural features and algorithms from hypothesis to production, working at the intersection of data science and engineering on GPS, inertial, and other sensor data.

You'll move between quick heuristics and full ML models depending on what the problem calls for. You ship code to production, not just notebooks.

What You'll Be Doing

• Work with raw, high-frequency sensor data: GPS, accelerometer, gyroscope, at scale. This isn't warehouse-tabular data: it's noisy, physical, and where the signal actually lives. You'll be processing more than 250k trips per day.
• Research new behavioural features and detection algorithms: read the literature, try ideas, kill the ones that don't survive contact with real data.
• Design and build behavioural features and factors that feed Zego's understanding of driving quality, context, and risk.
• Take ideas from hypothesis to production: prototyping in notebooks, then writing the production-grade Python and SQL that scales.
• Prioritise simple, robust solutions, rule-based when that's enough, ML when it's warranted.
• Lead experiments, validate impact with data, and automate insight generation.
• Collaborate closely with software engineers, product managers, and and actuaries to get features into the pricing path and measure their effect on real policies.
• Translate complex sensor data into clear findings that non-technical stakeholders can act on.

About You

• MSc (or integrated MEng/MSc) in a quantitative field: Engineering, Computer Science, Physics, Mathematics, or similar. This is a core role that requires strong engineering foundations.
• Working knowledge of digital signal processing or sensor physics — you can reason about noise, sampling, filtering, and the physical meaning behind a signal, not just its numbers.
• Proven track record delivering data science or data engineering projects into production. You write production-grade code, not just notebooks.
• Strong Python and SQL (we use Snowflake). Comfortable with the scientific Python stack: Polars, Pandas, NumPy, SciPy, and scikit-learn. 
• Experience developing and evaluating ML models on tabular data — classification or regression tasks where evaluation matters as much as model choice. Think passenger-vs-driver detection, transport-mode classification, or score predictiveness.
• You've designed, built, and maintained data pipelines from scratch: reliable, observable, and scalable.
• Fluent with AI coding assistants as part of daily engineering work. We use Claude Code across the team and expect candidates to be comfortable working with tools of this kind.
• Strong communicator: you translate ambiguous problems into structured, testable ideas, and share insights clearly with technical and non-technical audiences.
• Growth mindset: curious, open to feedback, driven to keep improving.

Nice to Have

• Experience applying signal processing to noisy, high-frequency sensor/time-series data (GPS, accelerometer, IMU) in production.
• Exposure to insurance, mobile data, or behaviour modelling.
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS), containerisation (Docker, Kubernetes), or data orchestration frameworks.
• Familiarity with our ML and tooling stack: MLflow for experiment tracking, DVC for data versioning, Streamlit for internal apps and demos.

What’s it like to work at Zego?

Joining Zego is a career-defining move. People go further here, reaching their full potential to achieve extraordinary things. 

We’re spread throughout the UK and Europe, and united by our drive to get things done. We’re proud of our company and our culture – a friendly and inclusive space where we can lift each other up and celebrate our wins every day.

Together, we’re setting the bar higher, delivering exceptional work that makes a difference. Our people are the most important part of our story, and everyone here plays a role. There’s loads of room to learn and grow, and you’ll get the freedom to steer your career wherever you want.

You’ll work alongside a talented group who embrace each other's differences and aren’t afraid of a challenge. We recognise our achievements, learn from our mistakes, and help each other to be the best we can be. Together, we’re making insurance matter. 

How we work

We believe that teams work better when they have time to collaborate and space to get things done. We call it Zego Hybrid. While some of our team choose to come into our central London office once a week, we’re flexible - some people prefer being in once a month or even quarterly. It’s all about finding the right balance between collaborative face time and focused home-working, so we can achieve great results while maintaining a healthy work-life balance.

Our approach to AI

We believe in the power of AI to meaningfully improve how we work - helping us move faster, think differently, and focus on what matters most. At Zego, we encourage people to stay curious and intentional about how AI is leveraged in their work and teams to drive practical impact every day. This is your chance to do the most meaningful work of your career - and we’ll provide you with the tools, support, and freedom to do it well.

Benefits

We reward our people well. Join us and you’ll get a market-competitive salary, private medical insurance, company share options, generous holiday allowance, and a whole lot of wellbeing benefits. We also offer an annual flexible hybrid working contribution, which you can use to support with your travel to the office or towards your own personal development. And that’s just for starters! 

There’s more to Zego than just a job - Check out our  for insights, stories, and more.

We’re an equal opportunity employer and we value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, or disability status.