Job Description
Ripjar is a UK based software company that uses data and machine learning technologies to help companies and governments prevent financial crimes and terrorism. This includes continuing to help many financial institutions and corporations comply with the recent addition of sanctions on Russian entities.
Is this the next step in your career Find out if you are the right candidate by reading through the complete overview below.
Ripjar originally span out from GCHQ and now has 140 staff based across Cheltenham, Bristol, London and Canberra, as well as a smaller presence in the USA and Singapore. We have two successful, inter-related products; Labyrinth Screening and Labyrinth Intelligence. Labyrinth Screening allows companies to monitor their customers or suppliers for entities that they aren't allowed to or do not want to do business with (for ethical or environmental reasons). Labyrinth Intelligence empowers organisation to perform deep investigations into varied datasets to find interesting patterns and relationships.
Data infuses everything Ripjar does. We work with a wide variety of datasets of all scales, including an always-growing archive of 8 billion news articles in (nearly!) every language in the world going back over 30 years, sanctions and watchlist data provided by governments, plus 250 million organisations and ownership data from global corporate registries.
This is a great time to join a growing group of highly talented technologists and data scientists who are building products that solve real world issues, and are changing the way criminal activities are detected and prevented.
Team Mission
The engineering team enables the delivery of high-quality software to a variety of environments through technical skills, process implementation and software management, anchored in a continuous innovation culture.
What You'll Be Doing
As an Operational Data Scientist, you will be responsible for working directly with our customers, in a consultative manner, to deploy and optimise Ripjar's data science and machine learning capabilities and tailor this to their specific needs. You will become an expert in the whole inner workings of our analytics and be able to advise our customers on how the software can be used appropriately and effectively to meet their needs. Using your creativity and problem-solving skills you will work closely with our customers, supported by your colleagues across Ripjar, to ensure they have the best experience using our software (with a focus on statistical attributes). Collaborations with our customers are mostly remote, though can also be on-site when required.
When not working directly with customers, you will be exploring and experimenting with new and interesting techniques, building capabilities that showcase our latest tech, enhancing test frameworks, supporting our partners, and improving our core products. You will be collaborating with Ripjar's Product team to improve the underlying software.
Ripjar is a company with data science right at the heart of what it does. The technology you will be using on a daily basis to help our customers detect financial crime and other risks will include: Entity Resolution, Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, Neural Networks, Large Language Models and Visual Analytics. You will therefore need to be able to pick up new ideas and concepts quickly and be adaptable as our technology stack evolves and improves. You will be supported in this through the Operational Data Science team, and wider colleagues from across the business.
Key Tasks
- Optimise the ongoing performance of our data analytics to maximise their performance for our customer's operational deployments
- Communicate the design and effectiveness of our data science and machine learning capabilities to our customers, analysts and fellow engineers
- Research and select relevant technologies, approaches and implementations as part of a team, to best help our customers
- Implement data science and machine learning techniques into engineered solutions that can be integrated into Ripjar's core technology offering
Key Skills
The successful candidate should have these skills (we recognise that demonstrable skills in all these technologies is not easy to find. Don't let that stop you from applying! We can work in partnership to identify your strengths and provide you with the training necessary to fill any gaps):
- Excellent communicator and able to represent Ripjar to current and prospective customers
- Strong software engineering experience in at least one programming language (Python preferred) and version control practices, as well as being familiar with standard data science tools (e.g numpy, pandas, sklearn, visualisation packages)
- Working knowledge of machine learning and other algorithms. Confident in performing statistical analysis of large datasets, including evaluating the results of experiments you design and execute
- Understand the nuances of dealing with structured and unstructured data, and be experienced in using databases (Mongo ideally)
- Experience with Linux
- Experience with Spark (Pyspark), Hadoop or other Big data technologies would be beneficial, but not required
Why we think you'll enjoy it here:
- Base Salary of up to £70,000 per year DOE
- 25 days annual leave, rising to 30 days after 5 years of service
- Hybrid working option for employees
- Company Share Scheme
- Private Family Healthcare
- Employee Assistance Programme
- Company contributions to your pension
- Enhanced maternity/paternity pay
- The latest tech including a top of the range MacBook Pro
- Candidates can work from our Cheltenham, Bristol or London offices
- Offices equipped with well-stocked pantries with food, snacks and drinks when in the office
"Diversity is essential in the way we operate. Having people from different backgrounds, genders and experiences ensures that we make decisions with a truly global perspective. Diversity gives us strength in our technology, analysis and relationships." - Maria Cox, Head of People Operations
Links we think you might like!!
- Profile Summaries (generated using LLMs) - feature launch
- AI Risk Profiles - Whitepaper
- Ripjar partners with Dow Jones