Principal Data Scientist: Credit Risk & ML Strategy

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

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision benefits

Flexible time-off policy

Parental leave

401k match (US)

Wellness reimbursement

Professional development budget

Volunteer days

Charitable donation match

Employee Choice: work location

Job summary

Forward Financing LLC is seeking a Principal Data Scientist to define the technical vision for data science and drive high-impact initiatives from concept to production. You will shape the multi-year DS roadmap and serve as a trusted advisor to senior leadership while ensuring scalable, well-documented modeling solutions.

You will mentor teams, collaborate with Portfolio Strategy, Engineering, Product, and Underwriting, and lead production ML pipelines with robust monitoring.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of hands-on model development and deployment in fintech.
• Deep experience in building and deploying credit risk models, especially underwriting models.
• Proven track record of leading high-impact data science initiatives from ambiguity to production.
• Experience with real-time models and production-grade pipelines is preferred.
• Expert in Python, SQL and Git with cloud deployment experience (AWS/SageMaker).
• Experience with workflow tools such as Metaflow is a plus.
• Strong statistics and ML fundamentals; able to mentor others.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design, development, and deployment of complex statistical and ML models.
• Orchestrate end-to-end data science initiatives from framing to production.
• Define architecture for modeling ecosystem: credit risk, pricing, loss forecasting.
• Partner with leaders to shape the data science roadmap and quantify value.
• Set standards for model development, validation, and documentation.
• Mentor data scientists across levels and foster continuous learning.
• Communicate technical concepts to executives and non-technical stakeholders.
• Evolve production ML pipelines and monitoring to ensure reliability.

Skills

Python

SQL

Git

Education

Bachelor's degree in Financial/Applied Math, OR Economics/Statistics

Master's or PhD preferred

Tools

AWS

SageMaker

Metaflow

Snowflake

Databricks

Arize

Taktile

Job description

Forward Financing LLC is seeking a Principal Data Scientist to define the technical vision for data science and drive high-impact initiatives from concept to production. You will shape the multi-year DS roadmap and serve as a trusted advisor to senior leadership while ensuring scalable, well-documented modeling solutions.

You will mentor teams, collaborate with Portfolio Strategy, Engineering, Product, and Underwriting, and lead production ML pipelines with robust monitoring.