Lead Data Scientist

Middesk, Inc.; New York (NY); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Middesk, Inc. is seeking a hands-on applied ML expert to build AI-driven applications focusing on risk and fraud management. This role requires over 7 years of experience in production ML, especially in building external-facing models for fraud and compliance.

Working in a hybrid model, the candidate should be locally based for in-person collaboration. Responsibilities include tackling imbalanced data challenges and establishing powerful ML infrastructure.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of production ML experience in risk, fraud, or trust & safety.
• Hands-on experience with knowledge graphs.
• Expertise in classification challenges like imbalanced labels.

Responsibilities

• Build ML applications for risk and fraud management.
• Innovate in feature engineering and ML infrastructure.
• Establish ML standards and solutions using knowledge graphs.

Skills

Production ML experience

Knowledge graph applications

Classification challenges

Hands-on ML infrastructure

Job description

About Middesk:

Middesk makes it easier for businesses to work together. Since 2018, we’ve been transforming business identity verification, replacing slow, manual processes with seamless access to complete, up-to-date data. Our platform helps companies across industries confidently verify business identities, onboard customers faster, and reduce risk at every stage of the customer lifecycle.

Middesk came out of Y Combinator, is backed by Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners, and was recently named to Forbes Fintech 50 List.

About The Role:

We are actively building AI-driven applications that streamline customer workflows, focusing on business onboarding. With our proprietary identity data assets and deep domain expertise, we are uniquely positioned to expand into a broader set of AI-powered solutions that drive long‑term growth.

We’re looking for a hands‑on applied ML expert to help build the technical foundation for these efforts. Ideally you have shipped external‑facing models in the risk/fraud space and know the messy realities of imbalanced data, low labels, and changing behavior. This is a highly technical, hands‑on role with wide influence on how we design, build, and scale ML at Middesk.

We follow a hybrid work model, and for this role, there is an expectation of 2 days per week in our SF/NYC office. Candidates should be based within a commutable distance, as we believe in the value of in‑person collaboration and building strong team connections while also supporting flexibility where possible.

What You’ll Do:

• Build risk & fraud ML applications: Deliver production ML models in fraud, trust & safety, KYB, and compliance domains, with measurable impact on customer workflows.

• Tackle hard data problems: Work on classification problems with extreme class imbalance, sparse signals, and “cold start” label challenges.

• Innovate in feature engineering & labeling: Use graph‑based techniques, weak supervision, LLMs, and AI agents to improve signal extraction and automate labeling process.

• Establish ML infrastructure foundations: Partner with the ML infra team to design feature services, model training pipeline, model serving standards, and orchestration to scale multiple ML use cases.

• Design and implement knowledge graph solutions: Leveraging LLMs for graph construction, querying, and retrieval to enhance entity resolution and business identity use cases.

What We’re Looking For:

• 7+ years of production ML experience in one or more of the following areas:

  • Building Production ML for risk, fraud, credit, or trust & safety: Track record of shipping external‑facing ML applications in one or more of these domains.

  • Knowledge graph applications: Hands‑on experience building, querying, or extracting signals from knowledge graphs—ideally over business entity networks (companies, persons, addresses, relationships) to support identity verification, fraud detection, or risk decisioning.

  • Entity resolution for business or individual identities: Experience disambiguating and linking records across noisy, incomplete, or conflicting data sources—particularly in KYB, KYC, AML, or identity verification contexts where the same real‑world entity may appear under different names, addresses, or tax IDs.

• Expertise in classification with real‑world ML challenges, for example: imbalanced labels, sparse signals, cold start, and production version management.

• Hands‑on ML infrastructure experience: feature stores, model management, ML training/serving pipelines.

• Comfort as a senior IC: setting technical direction, mentoring peers, and establishing best practices.
  

Nice‑To‑Have:

• B2B SaaS experience, ideally building ML products for enterprise customers.

• ML pipeline and automation engineering: Experience building end‑to‑end training harnesses that automate feature engineering, data validation, and model training.

• Experience scaling ML across multiple products or risk domains.