Research Scientist - Identity Verification & Fraud

Persona AI; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 220,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical

Dental

Vision

3% 401(k) contribution

Unlimited PTO

Quarterly mental health days

Family planning benefits

Professional development stipend

Wellness benefits

Job summary

Persona is seeking a senior researcher to advance identity verification and fraud prevention, including detection of AI-generated images and manipulated documents. You will design controlled experiments, test new ideas, and publish findings with our ML and engineering teams to strengthen production defenses for real customers.

You will collaborate across disciplines, focusing on model evaluation across diverse populations, rigorous experimentation, and communicating results to both technical and

Qualifications

• PhD or exceptional research record in CS/ML or related field.
• Experience researching identity verification, biometrics, or fraud detection.
• Peer‑reviewed publications in CVPR/NeurIPS/USENIX Security or equivalent.

Responsibilities

• Lead research on open problems in identity verification and fraud prevention, using focused experiments to test new ideas quickly.
• Develop methods to detect manipulated documents, AI-generated images and emerging fraud attacks.
• Evaluate how reliably our models perform across different populations.
• Uncover the patterns in verification data that reveal fraud, and prove they're real signal and not noise.
• Calibrate model confidence and measure fraud events with limited labeled data.
• Partner with ML and engineering to turn research prototypes into production models.
• Publish at top venues such as CVPR, NeurIPS and USENIX Security, and stay active in the research community.

Skills

Computer vision

Mathematics and statistics

Identity or fraud prevention

Education

PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Mathematics, Statistics, or related field

Job description

Persona is seeking a senior researcher to advance identity verification and fraud prevention, including detection of AI-generated images and manipulated documents. You will design controlled experiments, test new ideas, and publish findings with our ML and engineering teams to strengthen production defenses for real customers.

You will collaborate across disciplines, focusing on model evaluation across diverse populations, rigorous experimentation, and communicating results to both technical and