Lead Data Scientist Credit Risk (Collections)

Excited to grow your career

BBVA is a global company with more than 160 years of history that operates in more than 25 countries where we serve more than 80 million customers. We are more than 121000 professionals working in multidisciplinary teams with profiles as diverse as financiers legal experts data scientists developers engineers and designers.

Learn more about the area:

BBVA AI Factory operates as a global hub within the Data area of BBVA with development centers in Spain Mexico and Turkey.

Our mission is to build complete end-to-end data products that solve BBVAs business needs by working closely with business units to transform strategic priorities into actionable data-driven solutions. Some of our recent projects include:

• Mercury Library an in-house AI framework now available to the entire data community aimed at boosting collaboration and accelerating AI solution development.

• A machine learning pipeline designed to enhance early debt recovery by predicting default risk and optimizing collection strategies

• Applying daily life embeddings to drive deeper personalization in customer interactions and improve service recommendations.

• Utilizing conformal prediction to provide reliable uncertainty estimates and enhance the confidence in AI model predictions

• Building algorithmic explainability frameworks to ensure transparency and foster trust in our AI systems.

At BBVA AI Factory innovation isnt just a goal-its a continuous journey.

Why Youll Love Working Here

• Be part of a team that helps create an easier more personalized banking experience offering better service to our customers.

• Work on incorporating state-of-the-art AI to improve key bank processes like fraud detection risk management and debt management.

• Join us in developing a new customer relationship model supported by AI benefiting both end customers and managers.

• Collaborate with diverse teams composed of professionals from different disciplines including data science machine learning engineering solution architecture developers analysts and product experts.

• Embrace our obsessions: pursuing innovation developing reusable components and reaching the customer as quickly as possible.

About the job:

*Vacante publicada hasta el 17 de diciembre del 2025.

Key job responsibilities:

Strategic & Analytical Leadership

• Act as the analytical reference for the Collections program ensuring all data initiatives align with the broader Risk strategy and business priorities.

• Define and maintain a clear roadmap and planning for all analytical lines of work ensuring feasibility sequencing and delivery commitments.
  

Stakeholder & Product Collaboration

• Work closely with Product Owners and key stakeholders across Risk Collections Engineering and Architecture.

• Understand the functionality and business logic behind each line of work to design technically sound and business-aligned solutions.

• Communicate progress insights risks and recommendations clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.

Technical Excellence & Solution Design

• Design and lead the end-to-end execution of advanced ML solutions including model definition experimentation strategy architecture of the pipeline and production deployment.

• Create high-level and detailed solution designs making key decisions on algorithms architecture features evaluation and scalability.

• Drive forward-looking analytical practices such as causal inference conformal prediction explainability fairness and uncertainty modeling.

Hands-on Development & Model Oversight

• Guide (and when needed contribute hands-on to) the development of models using our analytical stack: XGBoost CatBoost causal inference frameworks conformal prediction traditional ML and statistical modeling etc.

• Oversee the lifecycle of ML products: feature engineering validation testing deployment monitoring and continuous improvement.

• Ensure models are production-ready efficient and compliant with regulatory and governance standards.

Team Coordination

• Coordinate and mentor Data Scientists ML Engineers and Data Engineers.

• Enable high-performing collaborative teams through guidance feedback and technical direction.

Required Qualifications

Experience

• 6 years of experience in Data Science Machine Learning or AI developing end-to-end ML solutions (minimum requirement).

• Proven experience leading analytical initiatives and collaborating with cross-functional teams.

• Experience in credit risk collections or financial services is a strong plus.
  

Technical Skills

• Strong proficiency in Python SQL ML frameworks (scikit-learn PyTorch TensorFlow) and distributed processing (PySpark).

• Strong knowledge of ML operations: pipeline design monitoring drift detection retraining CI/CD for ML.

• Experience working in cloud environments (AWS GCP Azure).

• Familiarity with explainable ML fairness uncertainty and governance practices.
  

Soft Skills

• Excellent communication skills to interact with stakeholders PO and leadership.

• Ability to translate business needs into analytical solutions.

• Strong planning and organizational abilities; comfortable managing several lines of work simultaneously.

• Adaptability and resilience in fast-paced evolving environments.

• Leadership presence and the ability to guide and mentor multidisciplinary teams.

Skills: