Head of Telematics Data Science

ABOUT ZEGO 🚀 At Zego, we're on a mission to do the good thing, not the insurance thing. Insurance hasn't changed much in over a century. The way we live, work and travel has. We're building the real-time, AI-driven infrastructure that powers innovative insurance, so good drivers get cover that works the way they actually drive. We're not just updating insurance; We're leading the AI evolution in insurance 🤖 For us, AI isn't a line on a roadmap or a buzzword on a slide. It's our operating reality, and it's how we build products that back drivers instead of the old insurance playbook. We don't do things slowly, and we don't do bureaucracy. We back high-performance builders who want ownership, early responsibility and the chance to do the most career-defining work of their lives. You'll get the space to try things, the tools to move fast, and the room to see your ideas reach millions of drivers. Do not take our word for it. Read what Zegons say about us on Glassdoor https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Overview/Working-at-Zego-Insurance-EI_IE1851459.11,25.htm. If you're ready to build the future of insurance, we're hiring. PURPOSE OF THE ROLE Zego has recorded over a billion miles of real-world driving, captured from phone sensors (accelerometer, GPS and more) across tens of thousands of policies and four very different kinds of driving: private car, van, taxi and delivery. The Telematics team uses digital signal processing and machine learning to turn that raw signal into a precise picture of how people actually drive. We use it to price insurance more fairly, to help drivers be safer on the road, and to power Zego Rewards, everyday rewards for good driving that turn car insurance into an engaging product rather than a box to tick. We own the full telematics stack (mobile SDK, on-device ML, cloud pipeline) and the full pricing stack. So we can link driving behaviour directly to claim type, frequency and severity, and feed one system's predictions straight into the other. We are one of very few companies that owns that entire loop end to end, on in-house proprietary technology. As Head of Telematics Data Science you will set the research agenda and own the technical direction of that work, reporting to the Director of Data. You will lead three data scientists directly and three ML engineers with a dotted line to you. The split is roughly 60% leading, 40% hands-on. Our long-term ambition is driving behaviour modelling that holds up across countries and handsets, is highly predictive of claims risk, and is deeply integrated with driver coaching so we can offer the fairest price and the best experience to good drivers anywhere. Our partnership with Sompo Holdings, one of Japan's largest insurance groups, will take models trained on UK roads into an entirely different market.   The problems you will be working on - Continuously pushing the predictive power of our existing algorithms and ML models - Telling drivers apart from passengers using sensor data alone - Detecting crashes and estimating their severity - Bringing map and road-context data into our models in a way that genuinely improves prediction - Handling handset and sensor heterogeneity, so a model behaves consistently on a five-year-old Android and a new iPhone - On-device ML under real battery and compute constraints - trip detection already runs on the phone, and more could - Making behavioural risk models transfer to new markets, starting with Japan   Several of these are open problems across the industry, not just at Zego.   What you will be doing - Define and drive the technical roadmap, making sure the team is working on the highest-impact problems - Lead the development of novel models to detect human behaviour and vehicle kinematics from high-frequency phone sensor data, on-device and in the cloud - Act as the primary technical authority on telematics across the business, advising on existing products, surfacing patterns nobody has thought to look for, and identifying new value propositions - Build, grow and mentor the team, setting the technical standards needed to produce exceptional work - Partner with Pricing to integrate telematics predictions into how we price risk, and with Data Products and Engineering to embed telematics insight into Zego's core products - Push our use of AI in the work itself in analytics, in model development, and in the driver coaching experiences we are building - Represent our telematics science to senior leadership, commercial teams and partners including Sompo - Own the metrics that track real-world model impact in production, and make sure our models meet our obligations around fair pricing when a model influences what someone pays, the fairness of that model is part of the job What you will need to be successful - A Master's or PhD in Data Science, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Physics, Mathematics or a related quantitative field though we are equally happy to talk to people with equivalent industry research experience - Deep expertise in machine learning and deep learning, preferably with hands-on experience building and deploying models on high-frequency time-series sensor data - A strong grounding in signal processing: signal modelling, decomposition, transforms and sensor physics - Experience leading and growing a data science team developing people and delivering through others, without losing touch with the technical work - Strong software engineering practice: Python, version control, reproducible pipelines and production-ready code - Experience with large-scale data processing (we use Kafka, Spark and Flink) - The ability to explain complex technical work clearly to senior leadership, commercial teams and partners, and a bias for connecting research to business outcomes - Preferably, experience with on-device or embedded ML under compute and power constraints - Familiarity with regulated environments, or with fairness and bias in applied models, is a plus - You work AI-first. You will use AI daily here, and we mean daily. You do not need to arrive an expert, but you do need to arrive curious, experiment fast, and take ownership of getting good quickly. People who wait to be trained will find this uncomfortable. THE ZEGO WAYS OF WORKING 🏡 Teams work better with time to collaborate and space to get things done. We call it Zego Hybrid: some of us are in our office (central London or Halifax) weekly, others monthly or quarterly. It's about finding the balance between face time and focus that produces great work and a healthy life around it. We also make a point of getting everyone in the same room. Teams come together every quarter, and once a year the whole company does, properly. It's a serious investment and consistently one of the best parts of the year. Here is what the last one looked like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKOYDx6AMxQ. BENEFITS 🎁 💰 Market-competitive salary, benchmarked against your function and reviewed every year. 🏆 Annual performance bonus, linked to company performance and your contribution. 📈 Share options, a real stake in the company and a share in the future you build 🩺 Private medical insurance. 🏖️ Pension, generous holiday, and £1,000 a year to spend on getting to the office or learning something new. 💻 Cutting-edge systems and tools, so you always have what you need to drive your impact. Ready to do the most impactful work of your career? We want to hear from you. Zego, leading the AI evolution in insurance. EQUAL OPPORTUNITIES 🌈 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.