Senior Data Scientist - Credit Risk & ML Strategy

Forward Financing LLC; United States; Hybrid; USD 160,000 - 220,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision benefits

401k match for US employees

Wellness reimbursement

Annual professional development budget

Volunteer days

Flexible time-off policy

Charitable donation match

Job summary

Forward Financing is seeking a Lead Data Scientist to drive end-to-end data science initiatives across the organization. You will design, deploy, and monitor advanced models for credit risk, pricing, and fraud, partnering with Portfolio Strategy, Engineering, Product and Underwriting to scale solutions.

You will mentor the team, define coding standards, and communicate impact to stakeholders while building robust production pipelines that continuously improve performance.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of hands-on model development and deployment in ML/statistics
• Deep experience building credit risk models, esp. underwriting in fintech
• Experience with real-time models and production-grade ML pipelines
• Expert in Python, SQL and Git
• Experience with workflow orchestration tools (e.g., Metaflow) preferred
• Experience deploying models in AWS (Sagemaker)
• Strong statistics foundation and experimental design knowledge
• Excellent project management and communication skills
• Strong critical thinking and problem-solving ability
• Nice to have: Snowflake/Databricks, Arize, decision engines, feature stores

Responsibilities

• Design, develop and deploy advanced models for credit risk, pricing, collections, fraud and other use cases
• Lead end-to-end data science projects from framing to deployment and monitoring
• Partner with cross-functional teams to integrate models into applications
• Define standards for model development, code quality and documentation
• Mentor team members and foster continuous learning
• Communicate complex concepts to technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Build and maintain production ML pipelines and monitoring systems

Skills

Python

SQL

Git

Statistical ML

Machine learning

Credit risk models

Experiment design

Project management

Critical thinking

Education

Bachelor’s or higher in Math/Statistics/Finance

Masters/PhD a plus

Tools

Metaflow

Sagemaker

Job description

Forward Financing is seeking a Lead Data Scientist to drive end-to-end data science initiatives across the organization. You will design, deploy, and monitor advanced models for credit risk, pricing, and fraud, partnering with Portfolio Strategy, Engineering, Product and Underwriting to scale solutions.

You will mentor the team, define coding standards, and communicate impact to stakeholders while building robust production pipelines that continuously improve performance.