Lead Data Scientist

Middesk; New York, San Francisco (NY, CA); On-site; USD 130,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

Middesk is looking for an experienced Machine Learning expert in San Francisco to develop AI-driven applications that enhance customer workflows. This hands-on role focuses on creating production-grade ML models in the risk and fraud domains, utilizing knowledge graphs and advanced ML infrastructure.

Ideal candidates should have at least 5 years of production ML experience, particularly in applying ML for identity verification and fraud detection. Join Middesk to make a substantial impact in shaping AI-powered solutions for business onboarding.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of production ML experience in specific domains.
• Hands-on experience with knowledge graphs for identity verification.
• Expertise in handling imbalanced data and model management.

Responsibilities

• Build AI-driven applications that streamline customer workflows.
• Deliver production ML models in risk and compliance fields.
• Establish ML infrastructure foundations for scalability.

Skills

Production ML experience

Knowledge graph applications

Entity resolution

Classification expertise

ML infrastructure experience

B2B SaaS experience

Job description

Requirements

• 5+ 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
• (Desirable) B2B SaaS experience, ideally building ML products for enterprise customers
• (Desirable) ML pipeline and automation engineering: Experience building end‑to‑end training harnesses that automate feature engineering, data validation, and model training
• (Desirable) Experience scaling ML across multiple products or risk domains

What the job involves

• 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
• 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