Staff Data Scientist, Algorithm (Payments Fraud & Optimization)

We are seeking a highly skilled and experienced Staff Data Scientist to drive the technical direction of our Payments Optimization team. This is a critical Individual Contributor (IC) role that will focus on designing and implementing advanced algorithms to optimize payments. You will act as a key strategic partner to Product, Engineering, and Commercial leaders, identifying complex, unique opportunities to improve payments performance and drive product adoption at scale.

Responsibilities

Define and drive the technical strategy for multi-objective payments optimization, ensuring that AWX optimizes payment conversion rates, fraud risk, and transaction costs; Act as the strong technical owner on cross-functional initiatives, solving unique, critical, and complex problems that have a broad impact on the business; Provide technical thought leadership on various optimization algorithms (e.g. contextual bandits) and experimentation techniques (e.g. A/B testing, causal inference); Collaborate with engineering teams to design and build tools and infrastructure to enable optimization at scale and deploy ML systems to production; Partner with Product, Engineering, Risk, and other cross-functional teams to inform and influence product strategy and investment decisions; Clearly and persuasively communicate complex data insights and technical recommendations to both technical and non-technical audiences, ensuring your findings influence stakeholders at all levels; Mentor and coach junior data scientists and engineers

Requirements

Advanced degree (PhD or MS) in a quantitative field such as Statistics, Engineering, Computer Science, Economics, or related disciplines; 5+ years of industry experience in data science or applied ML; Proven experience in experimentation and causal inference to drive data-informed product decisions with concrete impact; Demonstrated ability to operate as a technical leader, defining and developing critical systems and influencing product strategy in high-growth environments; Proficient in SQL and Python/R; Experience using LLM, AI and Agent to improve processes and ML models

Nice to have

Strong experience in deploying ML systems to production

Benefits

Opportunity to work on impactful problems that directly influence payments success and business outcomes; Collaborate with a talented, cross-functional team in a fast-paced, high-growth environment; Drive the adoption of advanced data science techniques and experimentation to improve customer and business outcomes