Forward Deployed Engineer, Trust and Safety

Sift Science, Inc.; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 250,000; Full time

Job summary

Sift Science, Inc. is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer, Trust and Safety, to detect fraud signals, tune decisioning logic, and help customers protect users while preserving frictionless experiences.

You’ll work with Trust and Safety architects, data science teams, and clients across verticals. Strong SQL/Python, ML for fraud, and clear reporting are essential. Travel up to 30% may be required.

Qualifications

• 5–8 years in fraud, trust & safety, risk, or a closely related technical domain.
• Strong SQL and Python skills; you reach for code to answer a question, not to build a pipeline.
• Hands-on experience building with AI: LLM APIs, prompt engineering, or agentic workflows.
• Strong understanding of ML concepts applied to fraud: classification models, feature engineering, precision/recall tradeoffs, threshold calibration, score drift.
• Experience analyzing large-scale behavioral or transactional datasets to find patterns and anomalies.
• Ability to communicate technical findings to both technical and non-technical stakeholders; you can write a forensic investigation report and present it to a VP of Risk in the same week.
• Customer-facing experience; you understand that different businesses have different priorities, and that listening before optimizing is part of the job.
• Ability to travel up to 30%.

Responsibilities

• Work with our Trust and Safety Architect and Data Science teams to surface emerging fraud patterns across the network, escape and proactively take them down.
• Detect patterns and turn those findings into sharper signals, tighter configurations, and smarter decisioning logic.
• Work across different verticals and closely with customers, partners and prospects with different risk appetites - some optimizing for approval rates, some minimizing chargebacks, some fighting account takeover and other types of abuse.
• Help build dashboards, tune models, decision logic and custom signals to help customers achieve their desired business outcomes.
• Identify sources of false positives, possible coverage gaps and other vulnerabilities by digging into raw event streams; form a hypothesis, design a test and implement the fix.
• Lead forensic investigations during fraud spikes: trace attack patterns to their source, identify the technique being used, deliver a clear writeup with remediation steps.
• Distinguish between one-off anomalies and systemic gaps that indicate a product opportunity - and advocate for the latter with rigor.
• Contribute to detection frameworks, investigative tooling, and internal playbooks that make every engineer and analyst at Sift more effective.
• Be the conduit between customer reality and internal roadmap; your field observations should directly accelerate what Sift ships next.

Skills

SQL

Python

AI/LLM

Prompt engineering

Fraud data analysis

Data analysis

Communication

Travel

Education

CS/Math/Stats/Economics degree or equivalent

Tools

LLM APIs

Real-time event processing

Job description

About the Team:

We’re people that are passionate about making the internet a safer and more trusted place for all. We love the fraud and trust & safety space and want to teach companies how they can protect themselves, their users and create frictionless experiences for legitimate consumers. As a Forward Deployed Engineer, Trust and Safety, you are heavily experienced in detecting and acting on multiple types of online abuse from a technical and quantitative perspective. You’ve helped build tools, models and detection platforms at companies that have had to work through these threats at a global level.

What you’ll do:

• Work with our Trust and Safety Architect and Data Science teams to surface emerging fraud patterns across the network, escape and proactively take them down.
• Detect patterns and turn those findings into sharper signals, tighter configurations, and smarter decisioning logic.
• Work across different verticals and closely with customers, partners and prospects with different risk appetites - some optimizing for approval rates, some minimizing chargebacks, some fighting account takeover and other types of abuse.
• Help build dashboards, tune models, decision logic and custom signals to help customers achieve their desired business outcomes.
• Identify sources of false positives, possible coverage gaps and other vulnerabilities by digging into raw event streams; form a hypothesis, design a test and implement the fix.
• Lead forensic investigations during fraud spikes: trace attack patterns to their source, identify the technique being used, deliver a clear writeup with remediation steps.
• Distinguish between one-off anomalies and systemic gaps that indicate a product opportunity - and advocate for the latter with rigor.
• Contribute to detection frameworks, investigative tooling, and internal playbooks that make every engineer and analyst at Sift more effective.
• Be the conduit between customer reality and internal roadmap; your field observations should directly accelerate what Sift ships next.

What We're Looking For:

Required:

• 5–8 years in fraud, trust & safety, risk, or a closely related technical domain - you've spent meaningful time working with fraud data, not just adjacent to it.
• Strong SQL and Python skills; you reach for code to answer a question, not to build a pipeline.
• Hands‑on experience building with AI: LLM APIs, prompt engineering, or agentic workflows - whether that's automating an investigation step, building a tool that surfaces patterns from raw data, or wiring together a multi‑step agent to accelerate fraud analysis.
• Strong understanding of ML concepts applied to fraud: classification models, feature engineering, precision/recall tradeoffs, threshold calibration, score drift.
• Experience analyzing large-scale behavioral or transactional datasets to find patterns and anomalies - you know what a fraud ring looks like in the data, not just in a textbook.
• Ability to communicate technical findings to both technical and non‑technical stakeholders; you can write a forensic investigation report and present it to a VP of Risk in the same week.
• Customer‑facing experience; you understand that different businesses have different priorities, and that listening before optimizing is part of the job.
• Ability to travel up to 30%.

Nice to Have:

• Hands‑on experience with fraud detection platforms (in house or 3rd party).
• Familiarity with real‑time event processing systems.
• Experience with rules‑based decisioning systems alongside ML - knowing when a hard rule beats a model score.
• Background in payments, e‑commerce, fintech, marketplace, or account security fraud.
• Prior forward deployed, staff engineering, or embedded consulting experience at a technical product company.
• Computer Science, Mathematics, Statistics, Information Systems, Economics degree or equivalent.