Pioneer Data Scientist: Build Fraud & Identity in Prod

Digital Zone; United States; Remote; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Digital Zone is seeking a senior data scientist to lead the first data science hire and build the function from the ground up. You will own fraud and identity modelling, production ML, and cross‑functional collaboration with product, engineering and marketing to deliver measurable outcomes.

You will define the team's charter, establish modelling standards, and drive experiments, threshold setting, and decision rules in a fast‑growth payments and digital services environment.

Qualifications

• 7+ years in data science with 2+ years leading or mentoring scientists.
• Experience taking models to production with live traffic and measurable outcomes.
• Fraud or risk modelling depth with identity resolution, forecasting, churn/LTV, personalization, uplift, or causal inference.
• Strong SQL against large transaction data; Python; code that others can run.
• Experimental and causal rigour, including quasi-experimental methods.
• Consumer fintech or payments fluency: transactions, funnels, cohorts, fraud patterns.
• Ability to align product, engineering, marketing and commercial on one problem.
• AI-assisted working with explainable outputs.

Responsibilities

• Build the function from one person to a team: charter, hiring, and the standard for how a model is specified, validated, shipped, monitored and retired.
• Own fraud detection as a product: transaction and payment risk scoring, chargeback and refund abuse, account takeover, promo abuse, agent and merchant anomaly detection.
• Own the modelling side of identity management: identity resolution and record linkage across sources, deduplication and match confidence, profile completeness scoring, and the unified customer profile.
• Drive the next-best-action and segmentation layer behind personalised customer communication.
• Get models into production and keep them there, with the cloud team on serving and MLOps: monitoring, drift, retraining, rollback, and one measurable business outcome per model you are willing to be judged on.
• Own the planning models: demand and stock forecasting, predictive budget, category and SKU level targets, churn and lifetime value.
• Own experiment design across product and marketing: hypothesis, minimum detectable effect, decision rule, and honest readouts including the null ones.
• Agree the boundary with data engineering and analytics. It is not settled today. Settling it is part of the job.
• Bring stakeholders a decision, not a notebook. Definitions come from the company metric contract, and an unvalidated figure does not become a fact by appearing in a deck.

Skills

SQL

Python

Production models

Experimental design

Fraud modelling

Identity resolution

Forecasting

Churn/LTV

Job description

Digital Zone is seeking a senior data scientist to lead the first data science hire and build the function from the ground up. You will own fraud and identity modelling, production ML, and cross‑functional collaboration with product, engineering and marketing to deliver measurable outcomes.

You will define the team's charter, establish modelling standards, and drive experiments, threshold setting, and decision rules in a fast‑growth payments and digital services environment.