Lead - POC Data Science

Location

- Remote - USA or Canada

- From Home / Beach / Mountain / Cafe / Anywhere!

We are a remote-first company with a globally distributed team. So you can find your productive zone and work from there.

About the role

We're looking for a Lead - PoC Data Science to lead our stellar Proof of Concept (PoC) data science team. This is a player-coach role where you will drive critical proof-of-concept (PoC) projects for enterprise customers and financial institutions, while developing your team’s craft and accelerating their impact. We’re seeking a hands-on leader with a passion for fraud prevention and the ability to build from scratch while thriving in high-stakes environments. You will work directly with clients to understand their unique fraud challenges, rapidly prototype proof-of-concept models, and help build scalable production ready solutions using fraud analytics and machine learning. You'll own a mix of client-facing POC/POV delivery, DS/ML product development, and team performance, with fraud domain expertise and technical credibility to work directly with clients, and with internal engineering, sales and product teams.

What you'll be doing:

- Lead and develop a team of IC data scientists — set direction, unblock work, run 1:1s, and grow each person's scope and impact

- Own POC/POV delivery — partner directly with enterprise customers to demonstrate fraud-loss reduction and platform ROI, from first data pull through to stakeholder readout

- Stay hands-on in the technical work — build or review ML models, conduct in-depth fraud analyses, and ship production-grade solutions alongside your team

- Define and track performance metrics — design dashboards and reporting frameworks to measure the effectiveness of risk strategies across clients

- Translate client problems into data solutions — act as a senior point of contact for fraud challenges, turning complex findings into clear recommendations

- Partner cross-functionally with Engineering, Product, and GTM to scope work, influence the roadmap, and ensure fraud solutions and models get instrumented and scaled correctly

- Drive experimentation — support A/B testing to safely validate new strategies before full rollout

- Raise the bar on craft — mentor IC data scientists on modeling rigor, storytelling with data, and client communication

What you'll need:

- 10+ years of experience in fraud/risk data science and analytics with demonstrated impact in fraud, payments, or fintech

- 3+ years in a people leadership role (team lead, manager, or tech lead with direct reports) — you've coached data scientists and helped them grow

- Strong hands-on technical skills — Python and SQL are essential; Spark, Kafka, or feature stores are a plus

- Experience delivering POC/POV engagements with measurable customer outcomes

- Proven track record with applied ML in fraud or risk — anomaly detection, classification, and graph analytics in production

- Expertise in BI and dashboarding — Sigma, Tableau, Metabase, or equivalent

- Strong communication and stakeholder management — able to translate complex model outputs for both technical and non-technical audiences, including clients and execs

- Bias toward action and ownership — you don't wait to be unblocked

Nice to have

- Familiarity with real-time decision infrastructure (Flink, Kafka, feature stores)

- Background in a high-growth fintech, payments, or financial institution