Data Scientist

SurePay; Utrecht; Hybrid; EUR 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Salary + benefits

Holidays

Hybrid work

Tech hardware

Travel allowance

Pension plan

Culture of ownership

Social events

Diverse team

Job summary

SurePay in Utrecht, Netherlands, is expanding its Fraud Risk Intelligence domain and seeks a Senior Data Scientist to design and launch a centralized risk-scoring engine for transactions. You’ll prototype quickly, collaborate with product and ML engineering, and translate complex data into production-ready solutions.

You bring 5+ years in data science (fraud/security), strong statistics, Python and ML libraries, and experience building data pipelines. Location: hybrid work in the Netherlands.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in Data Science roles, ideally within fraud, security, or high-noise domains.
• Strong statistical and analytical skills. You should be able to reason clearly about data and model performance.
• Proficient in Python and key ML libraries (e.g., pandas, scikit‑learn, PyTorch, MLflow)
• Experience designing, tuning, and evaluating machine learning models
• Knowledge of data pipelines, basic backend development, and infrastructure awareness
• Familiarity with model interpretability tools and techniques

Responsibilities

• Build quick-turnaround ML prototypes to validate hypotheses and identify signal quality
• Work closely with product and ML engineering to turn POCs into scalable systems
• Explore financial datasets to uncover patterns, edge cases, and insights
• Select the right algorithms based on the problem (supervised, unsupervised, anomaly detection, etc.)
• Fine-tune models with awareness of overfitting, false positives, and interpretability
• Help define how we measure success for fraud detection (e.g., recall vs. precision, AUC, business cost)

Skills

Python

Pandas

Scikit-learn

PyTorch

MLflow

Data pipelines

Model evaluation

Interpretability

Backend basics

Job description

Founded in 2016, SurePay is the leading account verification platform, relied upon by 250+ banks and thousands of organizations, to prevent fraud, misdirected payments, and reputational damage. Headquartered in Utrecht, we are scaling our platform and our team across Europe and beyond.

About the role

As part of SurePay’s strategic growth, we are expanding beyond our core Account Verification services to launch an integrated suite of actionable Fraud and AML risk intelligence products. To drive this, we have established a dedicated domain: Fraud Risk Intelligence. You will join a focused cross‑functional team and your primary anchor project is designing and launching our centralized transaction risk‑scoring engine. Within the team, you will collaborate closely with our other Data Scientist, focussing on translating complex statistical concepts into modular, production‑ready prototypes. Responsibilities include:

• Build quick‑turnaround ML prototypes to validate hypotheses and identify signal quality
• Work closely with product and ML engineering to turn POCs into scalable systems
• Explore financial datasets to uncover patterns, edge cases, and insights
• Select the right algorithms based on the problem (supervised, unsupervised, anomaly detection, etc.)
• Fine‑tune models with awareness of overfitting, false positives, and interpretability
• Help define how we measure success for fraud detection (e.g., recall vs. precision, AUC, business cost)

About you

This is an early stage product team so we are looking for someone eager to contribute with ideas, structure, and rigor and who enjoys solving messy problems and working across the full stack of data science. You bring structure to chaos, prototype quickly, and care about solving real‑world problems, not just building cool models. Furthermore:

• 5+ years of experience in Data Science roles, ideally within fraud, security, or high‑noise domains
• Strong statistical and analytical skills. You should be able to reason clearly about data and model performance
• Proficient in Python and key ML libraries (e.g., pandas, scikit‑learn, PyTorch, MLflow)
• Experience designing, tuning, and evaluating machine learning models
• Knowledge of data pipelines, basic backend development, and infrastructure awareness
• Familiarity with model interpretability tools and techniques

What we offer

• Competitive salary + 8% personal benefits budget (use it on training, more time off, or your salary)
• 25 holidays
• Hybrid working setup
• MacBook Pro, iPhone, and all the tech you need
• Travel costs covered (NS Business Card)
• Pension plan
• A culture of ownership, innovation, and autonomy
• Friday drinks, offsites, and a quarterly company meetup
• A diverse team of 35+ nationalities, driven by impact

About SurePay

• Founded in 2016
• Flat organisation and no hierarchy

SurePay makes payments easier, more personal and even more secure. We are a fast‑growing FinTech SaaS company and have secured our Series A funding in September 2021. SurePay stems from an innovation program of Rabobank, started in July 2016 and has been an independent BV since the beginning of 2020. SurePay is backed by two leading investors:Rabo InvestmentsandCarlyle Europe Technology Partners. Both are highly experienced in scaling international B2B SaaS and FinTech companies. Their support reinforces SurePay’s mission to prevent payment fraud globally and accelerate our international growth. SurePay's core values are; We Care , Build Together , Think Forward and Be Responsible. These core values are the driver’s of our culture and can be seen as guidelines on our beliefs and behaviour. It defines what we find important as a company and the way we work together everyday.

• We Care: We are a supportive employer and understand that health, family and safety is what really matters. We care about our employees, customers, partners and end‑users. Therefore we value creating a safe workspace where everybody can be their authentic self and where we, together, work on the same mission to provide safer payments.
• Build Together : We believe in teamwork and strive towards the best results together with employees and customers. Our diversity, both personal and professional, is one of our key strengths.
• Think Forward : We are frontrunners and are on top of our game. Our customers can rely on innovative solutions to service their current and future needs. With a problem solving mindset, we anticipate challenges and adapt to a fast changing environment.
• Be Responsible : We all contribute to reaching our mission of reducing fraud and misdirected payments, leading to a positive impact on society. We take responsibility, show ownership and make honest decisions.