Applied Machine Learning Manager - Application Fraud

SentiLink; United States; Hybrid; USD 200,000 - 250,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

401(k) plan

Flexible paid time off

In-person company events

Job summary

SentiLink is seeking a senior ML leader to directly manage a team of applied ML scientists and shape engineering and modeling practices across our risk and identity platform.

You will own area execution, mentor team members, and collaborate with Product, Engineering, and Risk to deliver high-impact ML solutions from data acquisition to production deployment. A proven leader with hands-on coding and strong communication will thrive here.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of industry experience applying ML or statistics to real-world problems, including 3+ years directly managing ML or data science teams.
• Experience at high-growth startups preferred.
• Experience leading ML or data science teams in fraud, identity, fintech, banking, financial services, payments, or adjacent risk-focused domains.
• Demonstrated success developing and deploying production ML models, plus experience writing production-quality Python code and tests.

Responsibilities

• Directly manage a team of applied ML scientists, 4 today and growing to 6 by the end of 2026, and help set the engineering and modeling practices they work by.
• Own execution for your area: priorities, delivery, and the results your team produces.
• Coach and mentor team members through model development, experimentation, and technical decision making, and remain hands-on where it matters most, including code review and production systems.
• Partner with senior leadership, Product, Engineering, and Risk to prioritize work and deliver impactful ML solutions.
• Communicate progress, tradeoffs, and results clearly, and grow into representing your domain in product strategy discussions.
• Develop and improve SentiLink's fraud detection and identity models across the full lifecycle: data acquisition, feature engineering, labeling strategy, model training, experimentation, production deployment, monitoring, and iteration.
• Research emerging fraud patterns, build new ML capabilities for identity verification and financial risk, and design analyses that inform product and business decisions.
• Use AI throughout your team's work, help push the boundary on what that unlocks, and contribute to our exploration of where AI belongs inside the products themselves.

Skills

Team leadership

Machine learning

Communication

Mentoring

Education

Bachelor/Master/PhD in CS/Statistics/Math

Tools

Python

SQL

Job description

Role

SentiLink provides innovative identity and risk solutions, empowering institutions and individuals to transact with confidence. We're building the future of identity verification in the United States replacing a clunky, ineffective, and expensive status quo with solutions that 10x faster, smarter, and more accurate.We've seen tremendous traction and are growing extremely quickly. Our real-time APIs have helped verify hundreds of millions of identities, starting with financial services and rapidly expanding into new markets. SentiLink is backed by world-class investors including Craft Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, NYCA, and Max Levchin.We've earned recognition from TechCrunch, CNBC, Bloomberg, Forbes, Business Insider, PYMNTS, American Banker, LendIt, and have been named to the Forbes Fintech 50. We have also been named a 2026 FICO Industry Vanguard Decision Award Winner. Last but not least, we've even made history - we were the first company to go live with the eCBSV and testified before the United States House of Representatives on the future of identity.SentiLink supports a variety of ways to work, ranging from fully remote to in-office. We operate as a digital-first company with strong collaboration across the U.S. and India. We maintain physical offices in Austin, San Francisco, New York City, Seattle (Bellevue), Los Angeles, and Chicago in the U.S., and in Gurugram (Delhi) and Bengaluru in India. If you're located near one of these offices, we would love for you to spend time in the office regularly. Some roles are hybrid or in-office by design. For example, our engineering team in India works primarily from our Gurugram office.

Technologies

Python 3, PostgreSQL, AWS, XGBoost, scikit-learn, pandas, Elasticsearch and OpenSearch, Neo4j, MLflow, Flyte, and use of modern LLM tooling.

Responsibilities

• Directly manage a team of applied ML scientists, 4 today and growing to 6 by the end of 2026, and help set the engineering and modeling practices they work by.
• Own execution for your area: priorities, delivery, and the results your team produces.
• Coach and mentor team members through model development, experimentation, and technical decision making, and remain hands-on where it matters most, including code review and production systems.
• Partner with senior leadership, Product, Engineering, and Risk to prioritize work and deliver impactful ML solutions.
• Communicate progress, tradeoffs, and results clearly, and grow into representing your domain in product strategy discussions.
• Develop and improve SentiLink's fraud detection and identity models across the full lifecycle: data acquisition, feature engineering, labeling strategy, model training, experimentation, production deployment, monitoring, and iteration.
• Research emerging fraud patterns, build new ML capabilities for identity verification and financial risk, and design analyses that inform product and business decisions.
• Use AI throughout your team's work, help push the boundary on what that unlocks, and contribute to our exploration of where AI belongs inside the products themselves.

Requirements

• 6+ years of industry experience applying machine learning or statistics to real-world problems, including 3+ years directly managing machine learning or data science teams.
• Experience at high-growth startups preferred.
• Experience leading ML or data science teams in fraud, identity, fintech, banking, financial services, payments, or adjacent risk-focused domains, and interest in growing into ownership of product direction for that domain.
• Bachelor's, Master's, or PhD in Computer Science, Statistics, Mathematics, Physics, or another quantitative discipline.
• Demonstrated success developing and deploying production machine learning models, plus experience writing production-quality Python code and tests.
• Strong practical ML and applied statistics knowledge: able to scope solutions quickly with standard tooling and go deep where it pays off.
• Comfortable working end to end, with a track record of measurable business impact: planning, defining success criteria, getting buy-in, building the solution, and delivering it, whether in production, in a deck, or as strategy.
• Comfortable with modern LLMs and AI-assisted development workflows and interested in pushing them further.
• Sound judgment when working with sensitive data under real information security and data governance constraints.
• Strong communicator who enjoys mentoring others while remaining technically hands-on. Detail oriented and thoughtful, someone we can rely on to make high-stakes calls while thriving on varied, open-ended, high-impact problems.
• Candidates must be legally authorized to work in the United States and must live in the United States.

Compensation

$200,000-$250,000/year + equity + benefits

Perks

Employer paid group health insurance for you and your dependents401(k) plan with employer match (or equivalent for non US-based roles)Flexible paid time offRegular company-wide in-person eventsHome office stipend, and more!

Corporate Values

Follow ThroughDeep UnderstandingWhatever It TakesDo Something Smart