Principal Data Scientist: Credit Risk & ML Architect

Forward Financing; Boston (MA); Hybrid; USD 208,000 - 286,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical benefits

Dental benefits

Vision benefits

Commuter benefits

401k match

Wellness reimbursement

Volunteering days

Professional development budget

Charitable donation match

Flexible work policy

Job summary

Forward Financing in Boston seeks a Principal Data Scientist to set the technical vision for data science, shape multi-year roadmap, and advise senior leaders. You will lead ML models in credit risk, pricing, and loss forecasting, with emphasis on production-grade pipelines.

You will mentor data scientists, enforce coding standards, collaborate across Portfolio Strategy, Engineering, Underwriting, and Sales, and translate complex analytics into business impact.

Qualifications

• Deep experience in building and deploying credit risk models, especially underwriting models.
• 10+ years of hands-on model development and deployment using advanced statistical and ML techniques.
• Proven track record of leading high-impact data science initiatives to production.
• Experience with real-time models, decisioning engines, and production-grade pipelines is preferred.
• Strong Python, SQL and Git proficiency; cloud deployment experience (AWS/SageMaker).
• Ability to influence technical direction and mentor senior staff.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design, development, and deployment of complex ML models in high-stakes domains.
• Drive end-to-end data science initiatives from framing to production and monitoring.
• Shape the modeling ecosystem architecture for long-term scalability and impact.
• Partner with senior leaders across teams to align data science with business strategy.
• Define standards for model development, validation, and documentation; act as technical authority.
• Mentor data scientists across levels and raise technical capabilities.
• Communicate technical concepts to executives and non-technical stakeholders.
• Architect and evolve production ML pipelines and monitoring frameworks.

Skills

Credit risk models

Underwriting models

Python

SQL

Git

AWS

SageMaker

Metaflow

Statistics

Machine learning

Education

Bachelor's degree in Financial/Applied Math, Operations Research, Economics, and/or Statistics

Masters/PhD is a plus

Tools

Metaflow

Snowflake

Databricks

Sagemaker

Tecton

Job description

Forward Financing in Boston seeks a Principal Data Scientist to set the technical vision for data science, shape multi-year roadmap, and advise senior leaders. You will lead ML models in credit risk, pricing, and loss forecasting, with emphasis on production-grade pipelines.

You will mentor data scientists, enforce coding standards, collaborate across Portfolio Strategy, Engineering, Underwriting, and Sales, and translate complex analytics into business impact.