Data Scientist, Underwriting

Parafin; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 190,000 - 230,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity grant

Medical, dental & vision insurance

Work from home flexibility

Unlimited PTO

Commuter benefits

Free lunches

Paid parental leave

401(k)

Employee assistance program

Job summary

A fintech company focused on small business support in San Francisco is seeking a Data Scientist to lead projects impacting their underwriting engine. You will develop and implement data-driven models, collaborate across teams, and leverage statistical methods to improve decision-making. This role offers competitive compensation ($190k-$230k) and benefits, including equity, unlimited PTO, and work-from-home flexibility. Ideal candidates should possess strong analytical skills and business acumen, alongside a passion for empowering small businesses.

Qualifications

• Ability to approach data analysis with critical thinking.
• Experience in designing metrics that guide decision-making.
• Knowledge of causal inference methods and machine learning models.

Responsibilities

• Lead projects from research to deployment for underwriting.
• Design, train, and deploy production underwriting models.
• Identify business opportunities for growth and profitability.

Skills

Statistical Reasoning

Business Acumen

Engineering Mindset

Leadership and Collaboration

Focused Execution

Job description

About Us:

At Parafin, we’re on a mission to grow small businesses.
Small businesses are the backbone of our economy, but traditional banks often don’t have their backs. We build tech that makes it simple for small businesses to access the financial tools they need through the platforms they already sell on.
We partner with companies like DoorDash, Amazon, Worldpay, and Mindbody to offer fast and flexible funding, spend management, and savings tools to their small business users via a simple integration. Parafin takes on all the complexity of capital markets, underwriting, servicing, compliance, and customer service for our partners.
We’re a tight-knit team of innovators hailing from Stripe, Square, Plaid, Coinbase, Robinhood, CERN, and more — all united by a passion for building tools that help small businesses succeed. Parafin is backed by prominent venture capitalists including GIC, Notable Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Ribbit Capital, and Thrive Capital. Parafin is a Series C company, and we have raised more than $194M in equity and $340M in debt facilities.
Join us in creating a future where every small business has the financial tools they need.

Our Impact

Data science is integral to Parafin’s mission. Our platform partnerships and lending history provide rich insights into the financial health of small businesses around the world. This empowers us to create fair, automated, and broad access to financial services. As Parafin scales, the breadth and depth of our data grows with it, amplifying the impact we can have on customers and the trajectory of our business.

Our Team

Enthusiasm, skepticism, and respect for data are in our DNA – two of our co-founders were PhD data scientists at Robinhood. Since our founding, we have grown the team to include perspectives from graduate studies in physics, mathematics, bioengineering, economics, financial engineering, and electrical engineering and professional experience at Robinhood, Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Faire, Segment, Facebook, and Google. We value first-principles thinking, attention to detail, and craftsmanship.

Our Work

The underwriting team builds and relentlessly improves the systems that determine eligibility, sizing, and pricing for Parafin lending products. Every dollar originated by the company is derived from underwriting’s business-critical assets. Our work ensures that Parafin stands out among lenders for its distinctive ability to use data and technology, and deliver a highly automated, accurate, and fair lending experience.

Our team partners closely with leaders across the company to shape what is possible: how can we make our underwriting more reliable? What data is most important to collect, to provide the best outcomes and growth? What new markets and products should we expand into? We look for teammates who balance the creativity and courage to implement new ideas, with the scientific rigor that helps ensure those ideas succeed.

Example projects:

• Training a quantile regression model to forecast the distribution of SMB revenues and precisely size our financing offers

• Using LLMs to help build a risk model and forecast that lets us underwrite merchants on banking transaction data

• Performing risk-based pricing optimization and experimentation

• Collaborating with engineering to build a modular real-time underwriting system

• Building a simulation platform to model and evaluate conversion and risk exposure across varied configurations for our financing offers

• Ingesting new data sources from both 3rd parties and partner platforms, and evaluate their use in improving our risk predictions

Beyond these focus areas, our team helps expand our impact by recruiting exceptional talent, improving our tools, and supporting each other through regular seminars and project reviews.

About You

Your Impact

You will make an outsized impact on Parafin’s trajectory by leading projects from end to end. You will quickly learn new methods, apply them across diverse areas of the business, and implement them robustly. You will develop expertise in specific areas of the business, but may tackle projects across domains as our priorities evolve.

You’ll own the full data-science lifecycle, from research to deployment, to power our underwriting engine. Specifically, you will:

• Design, train, and deploy production underwriting models

• Design experiments and metrics to drive risk and pricing decisions

• Partner with engineering and product teams to architect automated underwriting systems

• Identify business opportunities to improve growth and profitability via improvements to our underwriting posture

Your Background and Skills

We are open to candidates from a variety of academic backgrounds and professional experiences. We believe the most effective data scientists bring the following skills to their work:

• Statistical Reasoning

  • Approach data analysis with a critical, intellectually honest eye

  • Design concise metrics that guide decision making

  • Employ robust experimental design and causal inference methods

  • Develop valid and predictive machine learning models

• Business Acumen

  • Identify and effectively prioritize business problems

  • Solve business problems using appropriate data science techniques

  • Anticipate the impact of your work on our financial performance, customers, and compliance obligations

• Engineering Mindset

  • Write legible, reliable, and tested code

  • Build or source tools to boost the team’s efficiency

  • Architect technical systems that are highly scalable, reliable, and observable

• Leadership and Collaboration

  • Model Parafin’s values of efficiency, intellectual honesty, accountability, and empathy

  • Build trusted relationships with stakeholders

  • Document work, seek feedback, and share learnings proactively

• Focused Execution

  • Prioritize high-impact use of your time

  • Scope projects rigorously

  • Act with urgency

What We Offer

• Salary: $190k-$230k + EQ
  Senior Level Salary: $240-$300k + EQ

• Equity grant

• Medical, dental & vision insurance

• Work from home flexibility

• Unlimited PTO

• Commuter benefits

• Free lunches

• Paid parental leave

• 401(k)

• Employee assistance program

If you require reasonable accommodation in completing this application, interviewing, completing any pre-employment testing, or otherwise participating in the employee selection process, please contact us.