Lead Data Scientist - Telematics

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 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. Few teams use phone sensor data to price commercial motor insurance at scale. As a Lead 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. What You'll need to be successful - 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. - 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.   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. 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.