[Remote] Lead Data Scientist

Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Forward Financing is a financial technology company focused on providing flexible capital to small businesses across America. The Lead Data Scientist will drive end-to-end data science initiatives, developing and deploying advanced models and production machine learning pipelines for credit risk, pricing, collections, fraud, and other business use cases. The role also involves cross-functional partnership, technical leadership, mentoring, and communicating analytical insights to stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop and deploy advanced statistical or machine learning models for credit risk, pricing, collections, fraud, and other high-impact business use cases that drive better data-driven decisions
• Lead end-to-end delivery of data science initiatives from problem framing and model design through deployment, monitoring and ongoing maintenance
• Partner with cross-functional teams including Portfolio Strategy, Engineering, Product, Underwriting, Sales and Collections to integrate models into our applications, and proactively identify and solve problems in critical business areas
• Define and set standards for model development, code quality, and documentation; guide technical design decisions across the team
• Act as a technical mentor to team members, fostering a culture of continuous learning and rigorous analytical standards
• Communicate complex technical concepts and business implications to both technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Build and maintain production machine learning pipelines and monitoring systems to ensure models are reliable, scalable and continuously improving

Skills

• 8+ years of hands-on model development and deployment experience using advanced statistical and machine learning techniques such as generalized linear models, gradient boosting and deep learning
• Expert in Python, SQL and Git
• Experience deploying and managing models within a cloud platform (AWS, Sagemaker)
• Strong foundation in statistics and machine learning, and knowledge of experimental design
• Excellent project management and communication skills
• Strong critical thinking and problem-solving ability
• Bachelor's degree in Financial/Apfplied Math, Operations Research, Economics, and/or Statistics
• Deep experience in building and deploying credit risk models, especially underwriting models, in the fintech, lending or financial services industry is highly preferred
• Experience with real-time models, decisioning engines, and production-grade machine learning pipelines is preferred
• Experience with workflow orchestration tools, such as Metaflow is preferred
• Nice to have experience: cloud data warehouses (e.g. Snowflake, Databricks), Arize, Metaflow, Sagemaker, decision engines (e.g. Taktile), feature stores (e.g. Tecton)
• Masters/PhD is a plus

Benefits

• Medical benefits
• Dental benefits
• Vision benefits
• Commuter benefits
• Flexible time-off policy
• Paid parental leave
• 401k match for US employees
• Wellness reimbursement
• Volunteering days
• Annual professional development budget
• Charitable donation match
• Employee Choice policy allowing almost all employees to decide where they work
• Flexible hours

Company Overview

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