Senior Data Scientist

Job Description

THE CARWOW GROUP

Carwow Group is driven by a passion for getting people into cars. But not just any car, the right car. That’s why we are building the go-to destination for car-changing. Designed to reach drivers everywhere with our trail-blazing portfolio of personality rich automotive brands; Carwow, Auto Express, evo, Driving Electric and Car Buyer.

What started as a simple reviews site, is now one of the largest online car-changing destinations in Europe - over 10m customers have used Carwow to help them buy and sell cars since its inception. Last year we grew over 50% with nearly £3bn worth of cars bought on site, while £1.8bn of cars were listed for sale through our Sell My Car service.

In 2024 we went big and acquired Autovia, doubling our audience overnight. Together we now have one of the biggest YouTube channels in the world with over 1.1 billion annual views, sell 1.2 million print copies of our magazines and have an annual web content reach over 350million.

WHY JOIN US?

We are winners of the prestigious Culture 100 award that recognises the most loved and happiest tech companies to work for! We have just raised $52m in funding led by global venture capital firm Bessemer Venture Partners (an early backer of LinkedIn and Shopify) to accelerate our growth plans!

As pioneers, we’re always driving for new territory and positive change, so our work as a group is never done. Where others see difficulty, it’s our responsibility to see possibility – building new experiences, launching new titles and listening to drivers.

Being a part of Carwow Group means championing drivers and the automotive industry, acting as a disrupter and never being afraid to fail (but learning fast when we do!).

Our team of 500 employees across the UK, Germany, Spain and Portugal are revolutionising car-changing and we are fast expanding our mission across every single brand and country we operate in, so jump in!

THE ROLE

We are seeking an experienced and highly motivated Senior Data Scientist to join the Analytics & Data Science team. As a core member of our rapidly growing machine learning function within the business, you will be responsible for developing and implementing novel machine learning solutions that enhance and accelerate our key business operations. You will collaborate closely with stakeholders from Commercial, Operations, and Marketplace teams to understand their requirements, develop domain knowledge and a deep understanding of our data, then create robust machine learning models to drive key business objectives. This is an exciting opportunity to apply your expertise in machine learning to a diverse range of business applications in a successful and rapidly growing tech scale-up.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

• Collaborate with cross-functional teams including Commercial, Operations, and Marketplace to understand their specific business challenges
• Design and develop machine learning solutions for stakeholders that provide efficient and reliable solutions to business operations needs
• Focus on solutions that drive key business performance by identifying core drivers of success and developing models focused on enhancing them
• Effectively communicate the function and purpose of ML solutions to stakeholders with varying degrees of technical complexity
• Collaborate within the analytics team to understand how to best complement and enhance analytics projects and thereby enable wider team success
• Proactively identify opportunities for ML solutions in the broader business

WHAT YOU’LL NEED

Please note: We know that no candidate will be the perfect match for all we've listed in this posting, so we’d encourage you to apply if you feel you're close to the brief but not an exact match. Ideally you’ll have

• Extensive Machine Learning Experience: Demonstrated track record of building machine learning (ML) models in Python that translate data into actionable insights.
• Passion for Problem Solving: A relentless curiosity for understanding the factors that drive behaviours and trends in data. An analytical and investigative mindset that converges on efficient ways to extract insight from data.
• Technical Expertise: solid experience developing ML solutions in a cloud environment (e.g., Vertex AI, Sagemaker); understanding of software engineering principles including version control (Git), code reviews, agile methodology, unit tests; and (desirable) familiarity with containerisation.
• Stakeholder Management: Proven ability to work closely with stakeholders, actively listening to their needs, and translating those needs into effective ML solutions. Strong communication skills to present insights clearly and concisely.
• Quantitative decision making: Ability to evaluate model performance with well-motivated statistical tests and success metrics, and consideration for this process in model development and experiment design..
• Python proficiency: Fluency with core data handling packages in Python (Pandas, NumPy, Scipy) and machine learning modules (Tensorflow or Pytorch, Scikit-Learn).
• (Desirable) MLOps Experience: Familiarity with the ML production life cycle, including model training, monitoring, versioning, and model experimentation (champion vs. challenger).
• (Nice to have) LLM Experience: development of LLM-powered solutions that add business value, comparative model evaluation, expertise with prompt engineering and LLM concepts (chain-of-thought, RAG, custom agents)

INTERVIEW PROCESS

• Step 1: Hiring Manager Interview
• Step 2: Values and Experience
• Step 3: Technical Task with Presentation

WHAT’S IN IT FOR YOU

• Hybrid working, with two days a week in the London office
• Competitive salary to fund that dream holiday to Bali
• Matched pension contributions for a peaceful retirement
• Share options - when we thrive, so do you!
• Vitality Private Healthcare, for peace of mind, plus eyecare vouchers
• Life Assurance for (even more) peace of mind
• Monthly coaching sessions with Spill - our mental wellbeing partner
• Enhanced holiday package, plus Bank Holidays
• 28 days annual leave
• 1 day for your wedding
• 1 day off when you move house - because moving is hard enough without work!
• For your third year anniversary, get 30 days of annual leave per year
• For your tenth year anniversary, get 35 days of annual leave per year
• Option to buy 3 extra days of holiday per year
• Work from abroad for a month
• Inclusive parental, partner and shared parental leave, fertility treatment and pregnancy loss policies
• Bubble childcare support and discounted nanny fees for little ones
• The latest tech (Macbook or Surface) to power your gif-sending talents
• Up to £500/€550 home office allowance for that massage chair you’ve been talking about
• Generous learning and development budget to help you master your craft
• Regular social events: tech lunches, coffee with the exec sessions, lunch 8 learns, book clubs, social events/anything else you pester us for
• Refer a friend, get paid. Repeat for infinite money

Diversity and inclusion is an integral part of our culture. We know that diverse teams are strong teams, so we welcome those with alternative identities, backgrounds, and experiences to apply for this position. We make recruiting decisions based on experience, skills and potential, so all our applicants are treated fairly and equally.