Staff Data Scientist, Payments and Fraud

Courtyard, Inc.; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Fully remote work environment

401(k) plan with 4% employer match

Dogfooding stipend

Job summary

Courtyard.io is hiring a Staff Data Scientist to own fraud, risk, and payments analytics and models. This embedded role reports to the payments and fraud team, with autonomy to define detection, measure loss, and balance stopping abuse with good customers.

You’ll collaborate across engineering, operations, finance, and product to drive end-to-end risk initiatives and vendor evaluations, while influencing strategic decisions and product direction.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of DS/analytics experience focused on fraud, risk, trust and safety, or payments.
• Self-driven — you identify exposures others miss and propose actions.
• Experience building high-volume risk evaluation systems, rules, experiments, and productionizing models.
• Ability to operate in ambiguous environments and when labels are contested.

Responsibilities

• Own detection end-to-end from signal to production outcome.
• Develop risk measures and monitoring.
• Analyze disputes, chargebacks, and authorization performance to balance loss vs. customer impact.
• Collaborate with engineering, operations, finance, and product to optimize risk systems.
• Design review queues and determine when automation should replace manual decisions.
• Present risk insights to leadership and stakeholders.

Skills

Fraud analytics

Payments analytics

Graph thinking

Experimentation

Model development

Tools

SQL

Python

Spark

Job description

Staff Data Scientist, Payments and Fraud

United States

About Courtyard

Courtyard.io is the fastest-growing collectibles startup, ever. We are revolutionizing the world of collectibles trading by enabling instant liquidity and delivering a high-velocity, immersive experience. From trading cards to comics, we're redefining how people discover, collect, and unlock value.

Courtyard is not just another marketplace. All assets are securely vaulted and fully insured, giving collectors peace of mind alongside unmatched speed and simplicity. Whether you're investing, discovering, or curating your dream collection, we've built a platform that's trusted, simple, and built for speed.

And we're just getting started. We're a remote-first company hiring across all functions to push the boundaries of what's possible in collectibles and digital ownership.

Job Summary

Courtyard is hiring a Staff Data Scientist to own fraud, risk, and payments analytics and models. This is an embedded role to the payments and fraud team, and it comes with real autonomy: you'll decide what we detect, how we measure loss, and where the tradeoff sits between stopping abuse and getting in a good customer's way. You'll work across engineering, operations, finance, and product.

What You'll Do

• Own detection end to end — from finding the signal, to the model or rule, to something running in production that changes an outcome
• Build the resolution and network analysis that surfaces coordinated behavior rather than one bad account at a time
• Own how we measure risk
• Partner with marketing and product to pressure-test incentive and referral mechanics before launch, not after
• Own the analytical case for our identity and payments risk vendors
• Analyze disputes, chargebacks, and authorization performance, and manage the approval-versus-loss tradeoff deliberately
• Work with operations on review queue design — what escalates, what gets decided automatically, and where reviewer time is worth spending
• Make risk exposure legible to leadership

What We're Looking For

• 6+ years of industry DS/analytics experience, with meaningful time on fraud, risk, trust and safety, or payments
• Self-driven — you find the exposure nobody flagged and come back with a recommendation, not an observation
• High-velocity execution: Proven experience building high-volume risk evaluation systems and conducting complex vector analysis. You know how to build rules, run experiments, and hit the ground running.
• Comfort operating where labels are late, ambiguous, or contested
• Strong graph and network thinking, paired with excellent judgment about asymmetric costs (for example, balancing false positives against fraud loss).
• Payments depth (disputes, authorization, card network monitoring programs), identity verification, on-chain analytics, or two-sided marketplaces

What You'll Get In Return

• A dynamic and engaging environment focused on fostering real growth and innovation
• Opportunities to create amazing products that our customers truly love and value
• Comprehensive health insurance packages with dependent coverage
• Competitive salary with ample opportunities for career advancement and development
• Enjoy the flexibility of a fully remote work environment
• 401(k) plan with a 4% employer match to help you plan for the future
• $100 monthly dogfooding stipend to support trying out our products firsthand
• Access to employee wellness programs designed to support your overall well-being