Lead Data Scientist - Credit & Risk

Chexy; Toronto; On-site; CAD 100,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

Chexy in Toronto is seeking an experienced data scientist to lead the development of credit and underwriting functions from the ground up. This role requires deep hands-on experience in building credit risk models and involves owning the data, models, and policy to shape decision-making.

The ideal candidate will have 6+ years in data science, with proficiency in Python and SQL, and a strong understanding of the credit lifecycle. This position is fully onsite in our downtown office, fostering a collaborative and dynamic work environment.

Qualifications

• 6+ years in data science with experience in building underwriting models.
• You've shipped models into production and monitored their performance.
• Understanding of the full credit lifecycle including loss forecasting.

Responsibilities

• Own credit and underwriting function, strategy, and models.
• Build and deploy underwriting models for flex products in production.
• Define credit data layer and metrics that matter for monitoring.

Skills

Hands-on experience building credit risk models

Fluent in Python

Fluent in SQL

Experience in lending or fintech

Analytical skills

Tools

BigQuery

Job description

King Street East, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5A 1L3 full-time . May 29, 2026

At Chexy, we're reshaping the way money moves - making payments smarter, faster, and more rewarding. We started by being the first in Canada to let people pay their biggest and most painful bills with credit cards and earn rewards on money they had to spend anyway. Now, we're on a much bigger mission: to build a super app that acts as your co-pilot for all your money - helping you get more value from every dollar you spend.

Backed by Khosla Ventures and processing $2B+ in annual payment volume, we're a high-growth fintech at the forefront of payments innovation. We are looking for hungry, ambitious people to help us scale.

About the role

This is the most important technical hire we'll make this year, and one of the rare data science roles where you get to build an entire discipline from zero.

We're launching a line of flex payment products for your largest bills. These products are the foundation of something much larger: they're how Chexy builds the underwriting and credit muscle that will eventually power our full financial ecosystem. There is no playbook here yet. You'll write it.

You’ll own credit and underwriting end to end: the models, the policy, the risk appetite, the decisioning logic, and the data infrastructure that feeds all of it. And you’ll do it sitting on top of a dataset almost no one else in Canada has: how hundreds of thousands of Canadians actually pay their largest recurring bills, month after month. That’s underwriting signal our competitors can’t buy.

You won’t be handed a risk framework and asked to maintain it. You’ll build the credit brain of the company, which means hands on the data, hands on the models and then head up the function as it grows. If you want a role where the decisions you make show up directly in approval rates, loss curves, and a product roadmap that runs all the way to a credit card, this is it.

What you’ll own

• The credit and underwriting function from the ground up: strategy, models, policy, and the team that follows
• Underwriting and decisioning models for Rent Flex and every Flex product after it, built and deployed in production
• The credit data layer: defining the features, signals, and infrastructure that turn Chexy’s payment data into underwriting power
• Risk appetite and credit policy - approval logic, limit assignment, pricing inputs, and the guardrails that keep losses where they should be
• Loss forecasting, portfolio monitoring, and the early‑warning systems that tell us when something’s moving before it shows up in the numbers
• Cross‑functional partnership with Product and Engineering to ship decisioning into the live product, and with Compliance and our banking partners to keep it sound and regulator‑ready
• The metrics that matter – approval rate, loss rate, model performance – owned by you, monitored by you, defended by you

Who you are

• 6+ years in data science, with deep, hands‑on experience building credit risk, underwriting, or decisioning models: ideally in lending, BNPL, cards, or fintech
• You’ve shipped models into production and you’ve watched them perform (or misbehave) against real money
• Fluent in Python and SQL, comfortable living in the data warehouse (we run on BigQuery) and turning messy data into decisions
• You understand the full credit lifecycle: acquisition scoring, underwriting, limits, loss forecasting
• A genuine 0‑to‑1 builder: you can stand up a function from nothing, set the strategy, and still write the code yourself
• Analytical enough to own your outcomes: you don’t need someone else to tell you whether a model is working
• Familiarity with the Canadian credit ecosystem (Equifax, TransUnion) and the regulatory environment around lending is a strong plus

Why Chexy

• We are building the next category‑defining payments company that will shape how money moves in Canada for generations.
• We are a high‑performance team that actually likes each other. We’re fast, we’re ambitious, and we have zero tolerance for “corporate boredom.” If you want to work with people who are as witty as they are technical, you’ve found your home.
• Most credit and risk roles at this level have you tuning someone else’s model inside someone else’s framework. Here you build the whole thing — the data, the models, the policy, and the product they power. There’s no layer between your work and the decisions the company makes.

Note: this position is fully onsite at our downtown Toronto office, 5 days a week.