Forward Deployed Data Scientist

Sift Science, Inc

$120K — $160K *
Consumer Technology
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5-8 years in fraud, trust & safety, or risk-related fields working directly with fraud data
  • Proficient in SQL and Python for hands-on data analysis
  • Strong understanding of machine learning concepts relevant to fraud detection
  • Experience analyzing large-scale datasets for pattern identification
  • Ability to communicate technical findings effectively to diverse audiences
  • Customer-facing experience with an understanding of varied business priorities

Responsibilities

  • Collaborate with Trust and Safety and Data Science teams to identify and address fraud patterns
  • Transform detection findings into actionable signals and decisioning logic
  • Engage with various clients to tailor risk management strategies
  • Develop dashboards and optimize models for customer solutions
  • Investigate false positives and vulnerabilities by analyzing raw data
  • Lead investigations into fraud incidents and provide remediation recommendations
  • Advocate for product opportunities based on systemic issues identified

Benefits

  • Flexible work arrangements including remote opportunities
  • Comprehensive health and wellness programs
  • Professional development and training support
  • Collaborative and innovative work environment
  • Access to advanced analytics and fraud detection tools
Full Job Description
What you'll do:
  • Work with our Trust and Safety Architect and Data Science teams to surface emerging fraud patterns across the network escalate and proactively take them down.
  • Detect patterns and turn those findings into sharper signals, tighter configurations, and smarter decisioning logic.
  • Work across different verticals and closely with customers, partners and prospects with different risk appetites - some optimizing for approval rates, some minimizing chargebacks, some fighting account takeover and other types of abuse.
  • Help build dashboards, tune models, decision logic and custom signals to help customers achieve their desired business outcomes
  • Identify sources of false positives, possible coverage gaps and other vulnerabilities by digging into raw event streams; form a hypothesis, design a test and implement the fix
  • Lead forensic investigations during fraud spikes: trace attack patterns to their source, identify the technique being used, deliver a clear writeup with remediation steps
  • Distinguish between one-off anomalies and systemic gaps that indicate a product opportunity - and advocate for the latter with rigor
  • Contribute to detection frameworks, investigative tooling, and internal playbooks that make every engineer and analyst at Sift more effective
  • Be the conduit between customer reality and internal roadmap; your field observations should directly accelerate what Sift ships next
What We're Looking For

Required
  • 5-8 years in fraud, trust & safety, risk, or a closely related technical domain - you've spent meaningful time working with fraud data, not just adjacent to it
  • Strong SQL and Python skills; you reach for code to answer a question, not to build a pipeline
  • Strong understanding of ML concepts applied to fraud: classification models, feature engineering, precision/recall tradeoffs, threshold calibration, score drift
  • Experience analyzing large-scale behavioral or transactional datasets to find patterns and anomalies - you know what a fraud ring looks like in the data, not just in a textbook
  • Ability to communicate technical findings to both technical and non-technical stakeholders; you can write a forensic investigation report and present it to a VP of Risk in the same week
  • Customer-facing experience; you understand that different businesses have different priorities, and that listening before optimizing is part of the job

Nice to Have
  • Hands-on experience with fraud detection platforms (in house or 3rd party)
  • Hands-on experience building with AI: LLM APIs, prompt engineering, or agentic workflows - whether that's automating an investigation step, building a tool that surfaces patterns from raw data, or wiring together a multi-step agent to accelerate fraud analysis
  • Familiarity with real-time event processing systems
  • Experience with rules-based decisioning systems alongside ML - knowing when a hard rule beats a model score
  • Background in payments, e-commerce, fintech, marketplace, or account security fraud
  • Prior forward deployed, staff engineering, or embedded consulting experience at a technical product company
  • Computer Science, Mathematics, Statistics, Information Systems, Economics degree or equivalent

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