Senior Research Scientist

Candidate; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision

3% 401(k) contribution

Unlimited PTO

Job summary

Persona is expanding its team to tackle challenging problems in identity verification and fraud prevention. You will research AI-driven attacks, verify identities, and develop robust defenses with an emphasis on real-world impact.

You will publish at top venues and collaborate with ML and engineering teams to deploy production-grade models. A PhD is strongly preferred, with a track record of peer-reviewed work and clear communication skills.

Qualifications

• Deep expertise in computer vision, mathematics, statistics, or identity verification and fraud prevention.
• Proven ability to lead research, design rigorous experiments, and publish results.
• Clear communication of methods, findings, and limitations to technical and non-technical audiences.

Responsibilities

• Lead research on identity verification and fraud prevention with focused experiments.
• Develop methods to detect manipulated documents and AI-generated imagery.
• Evaluate model performance across diverse populations and data.
• Publish findings in top venues and collaborate with ML/engineering teams to productionize research.

Skills

Computer vision

Mathematics & statistics

Identity & fraud prevention

Education

PhD in CS/ML/Math/Statistics

MS with exceptional research record

Job description

About Persona

Persona is the configurable identity platform built for businesses in a digital-first world. Verifying individuals and organizations is harder — but more important — than ever, with AI enabling fraudsters to launch sophisticated accounts at scale and regulations evolving rapidly.

We’ve built Persona to support practically every use case and industry — that’s why we’re able to serve a wide range of leading companies. For example, Reddit relies on Persona for age assurance and verification to comply with online safety regulations, protecting younger users while maintaining a seamless experience. Meanwhile, OpenAI relies on Persona to keep bad actors out, protecting one of the world’s most powerful AI platforms from large-scale abuse in a time when AI is reshaping the way we work and live.

We’re growing rapidly and looking for exceptional people to join us!

About the role

Proving who someone is online has never been harder or more important. You'll research how to detect fraud and verify identities more accurately. Your work will include detecting AI-generated and manipulated images, understanding how models perform across populations, and finding patterns in how attackers behave.

You bring depth in at least one of computer vision, mathematics and statistics, or identity verification and fraud prevention. You test ideas with focused experiments and follow what the results show. You'll work with our ML and engineering teams to turn your findings into defenses for real customers, and you'll get to publish your work.

What you’ll do at Persona

• 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.

What you’ll bring to Persona

• Deep expertise in one of the following:

  • Computer vision: research in image forensics, face analysis, generative models or representation learning.

  • Mathematics and statistics: strong foundation in areas such as probability, statistical inference, optimization, or applied mathematics, with experience applying it to empirical research.

  • Identity or fraud prevention: Experience researching identity verification, biometrics, fraud detection, out-of-distribution detection, adversarial behavior, or closely related security problems.

• A PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Mathematics, Statistics, or a related technical field is strongly preferred. We will also consider candidates with an MS and an exceptional research record.

• A demonstrated record of peer-reviewed publications in relevant conferences or journals, with substantive contributions to the research.

• Independently lead research, design rigorous experiments, and use results including negative or unexpected findings to guide next steps.

• Clear communication, including the ability to explain experimental design, findings, and limitations to technical and non-technical audiences.

Nice to haves

• Research on deepfakes, presentation attacks or adversarial robustness.

• Experience with noisy, imbalanced real-world data.

• Experience shipping ML research to production.

Benefits and Perks

For full-time US-based employees (excluding internship and contractor opportunities), Persona offers a wide range of benefits, including medical, dental, and vision, 3% 401(k) contribution, unlimited PTO, quarterly mental health days, family planning benefits, professional development stipend, wellness benefits, among others.

For full-time UK employees, Persona offers a wide range of benefits, including private medical insurance, dental insurance, a 6% employer pension contribution, unlimited PTO, a monthly wellness stipend, professional development stipend, co-working stipend, and more.

As part of our interview process, all candidates will be asked to verify their identity with Persona. This step is used solely to confirm that candidates are who they say they are, and will have no impact on hiring decisions.