Director – Machine Learning

Barclay Simpson; Glasgow; On-site; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Barclay Simpson is recruiting a Director to lead its UK Financial Crime Machine Learning portfolio from its Glasgow campus, with four in-office days per week. The role involves setting technical direction, leading data scientists, and guiding models from exploration through deployment and monitoring to ensure governance and business value.

You will work with senior stakeholders across technology, compliance and the business to prioritise problems and deliver reliable, scalable ML solutions in a

Qualifications

• Experience building and deploying ML models in production.
• Strong Python skills and hands-on coding ability.
• Experience managing and developing data scientists is essential.
• Ability to explain technical decisions and align stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Lead the UK Financial Crime ML portfolio, including fraud detection and transaction monitoring.
• Set technical direction and oversee model development from exploration to deployment, monitoring and improvement.
• Review Python code and model design; decide on scalable solutions.
• Develop the team, set delivery standards and governance controls for models.
• Collaborate with senior stakeholders across technology, compliance and business.

Skills

Python

Leadership

ML model deployment

Stakeholder management

MLOps

Tools

Spark / PySpark

Job description

Director – Machine Learning | Financial Crime
Glasgow | Four days per week in the office

How do you take a promising machine learning model and make it work reliably within a major bank?

We’re recruiting on behalf of our client for a Director to lead its UK Financial Crime Machine Learning portfolio, covering fraud detection and transaction monitoring.

You’ll set technical direction and lead a team of data scientists, with responsibility for models from initial exploration and feature engineering through to deployment, monitoring and improvement. This is a leadership role with real technical involvement: reviewing Python code, challenging model design and making decisions about how solutions will scale.

Working with senior stakeholders across technology, compliance and the business, you’ll help decide which problems to tackle and make sure the resulting models are useful in day‑to‑day operations. You’ll also develop the team, set delivery standards and ensure models meet the bank’s governance and control requirements.

What you’ll bring

You’ll have experience building and deploying machine learning models in production, alongside strong hands‑on Python skills. You should be comfortable with distributed computing tools such as Spark or PySpark, cloud platforms and modern MLOps practices.

Experience managing and developing data scientists is essential, as is the ability to explain technical decisions and work through competing priorities with senior stakeholders.

Financial crime experience would be useful, but we’re interested in speaking with ML leaders from other sectors who have delivered reliable models in complex environments.

Location

The role is based at our client’s Glasgow campus, with four days per week in the office.

If you’d like to discuss the role, contact Michael at [e-mail].