Lead Machine Learning Scientist, Search

Monzo; United States; Remote; USD 153,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Relocation to UK

Visa sponsorship

Flexible working hours

Learning budget £1000/year

Job summary

Monzo, a forward-thinking fintech, seeks a Lead Machine Learning Scientist for the ML Search team. You will build and deploy models that help customers search for and manage their financial lives, leveraging embeddings, contextual bandits and ranking algorithms.

You’ll work on a modern cloud-native platform with billions of rows of data, aiming for scalable, explainable AI that improves customer outcomes. UK relocation and visa sponsorship are available, plus flexible hours and a £1,000 learning

Qualifications

• Multiple year track record leading the development and deployment of advanced ML models to tackle real business problems, preferably in a fast-moving tech company.
• Experience developing and shipping state-of-the-art ML models to production and delivering measurable business impact.
• Strong Python fluency; extensive hands-on experience with scikit-learn; comfortable with SQL; eager to learn Go.

Responsibilities

• Lead development and deployment of advanced ML models to support customer search and discovery.
• Build scalable, explainable, and responsible AI solutions to enhance trust and user experience.
• Justify and demonstrate effectiveness of approaches while aligning with business needs.

Skills

Python

scikit-learn

SQL

Go

Machine Learning

Leadership

Personalisation

Tools

Go lang

Cloud platforms

Job description

We’re on a mission to make money work for everyone. We’re waving goodbye to the complicated and confusing ways of traditional banking.

After starting as a prepaid card, our product offering has grown a lot in the last 10 years in the UK. As well as personal and business bank accounts, we offer joint accounts, accounts for 16-17 year olds, a free kids account and credit cards in the UK, with more exciting things to come beyond. Our UK customers can also save, invest and combine their pensions with us.

With our hot coral cards and get-paid-early feature, combined with financial education on social media and our award winning customer service, we have a long history of creating magical moments for our customers! We’re not about selling products - we want to solve problems and change lives through Monzo

London/Cardiff/UK Remote | £115,000 - £150,000 + Incentive Awards tied to your performance + Benefits

About our Machine Learning Search Team

We are currently embarking on one of our two top strategic priorities to make Money work for Everyone: building the Monzo Co-pilot. We are becoming an intelligent, proactive ally that handles the complexity of users financial life. We aren't just selling financial products; we are building a truly smart agent that understands users, anticipates their needs, and helps people reach their financial goals.

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.

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:

• 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

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

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