Senior Data Scientist

At Koalafi we believe in a world where no one has to put an important purchase on hold. Thats why were making it easier for more people to pay for big purchases over time.

Retailers across the country rely on us to offer flexible lease-to-own financing to their non-prime consumers while increasing sales and strengthening customer loyalty. Their 2M customers love us because we provide a flexible way for them to make payments and give them an opportunity to improve their credit. Our 200 Koalafi teammates enjoy inspiring and challenging work that accelerates their careers.

Interested in learning more about how were transforming the financing experience and joining our team

What Youll Do

Are you a senior-level data scientist with a passion for building and deploying high-impact fraud or credit risk models Koalafi is seeking an experienced Data Scientist to lead the development deployment and monitoring of machine learning models that sit at the core of our portfolios profitability. This role requires someone who thrives in an end-to-end environmentdesigning predictive models operationalizing them in production and ensuring they continue to perform in a dynamic market.

You will be a key contributor to Koalafis decisioning ecosystem owning models that directly influence credit outcomes fraud mitigation and the financial performance of the company. Beyond technical expertise you will bring strong business intuition enabling you to translate modeling insights into strategic decisions. This position reports to the Manager of Data Science and regularly partners with senior leaders across Risk Fraud Analytics and Technology.

Responsibilities

• Build deploy and maintain production-grade credit and fraud models that are foundational to our real-time decisioning platform and essential to portfolio profitability
• Own the full MLOps lifecyclefrom feature engineering model training and experiment management to production deployment performance monitoring drift detection and continuous optimization
• Architect and scale end-to-end ML pipelines ensuring reliability reproducibility and seamless integration with core decisioning services
• Design robust model monitoring frameworks that enable tracing profiling explainability and rapid root-cause analysis for production incidents or model degradation
• Partner with data science risk and engineering leaders to shape modeling strategy improve credit policy and strengthen fraud defenses in response to customer behavior and macroeconomic trends
• Drive continuous improvement of existing models incorporating new data sources advanced techniques and rigorous validation processes
• Communicate complex model logic and insights to non-technical stakeholders clearly linking modeling decisions to business outcomes and strategic priorities

About You

• 5 years of hands-on experience building and deploying machine learning models with a strong grasp of the end-to-end modeling lifecycle from feature engineering to validation and productionization
• 5 years of professional experience writing performant maintainable Python code in a collaborative production environment leveraging core data science libraries like pandas numpy xgboost and scikit-learn
• 2 Years of experience working on Credit or Fraud risk models
• Proficient in SQL for querying transforming and analyzing large datasets and comfortable working across relational databases and cloud-based data platforms
• Strong understanding of data structures algorithms and software engineering principles and apply them to build robust and scalable data solutions
• Bachelors degree in a quantitative or STEM field (e.g. Statistics Mathematics Computer Science Engineering) and demonstrate strong analytical and problem-solving skills in your work

Preferred Qualifications

• Advanced technical and analytical background ideally with a Masters or PhD in a quantitative or STEM field and a strong understanding of probability statistics and predictive modeling algorithms (e.g. Boosting Random Forests Decision Trees Bayesian models)
• Exposure to data and compute platforms such as Snowflake and Databricks
• Background in financial services or experience working in fast-moving high-growth environments such as startups
• Experience with modern ML infrastructure and tooling including MLOps frameworks (e.g. MLflow BentoML) CI/CD automation and model observability monitoring and lifecycle management
• Familiarity with large language models (LLMs) and their deployment in production environments

Why choose Koalafi: A career at Koalafi means opportunities to tackle exciting challenges every single day. We take pride in a culture of innovation trust and ownership. Youll get outside your comfort zone build meaningful relationships and most of all take charge of projects that ultimately help people get the things they need most.

Benefits:

At Koalafi you will have a direct impact on our products and help shape the companys success. We offer competitive compensation & benefits packages to keep you at your best:

• Comprehensive medical dental and vision coverage
• 20 PTO days 11 paid holidays
• 401(k) retirement with company matching
• Student Loan & Tuition Reimbursement
• Commuter assistance
• Parental leave (maternal paternal)
• Inclusion and Associate Engagement Programs

Who we are & what we value:

• We focus on whats most important
• We set clear expectations and deliver
• We embrace challenges to reach our full potential
• We ask How can this be better
• We move fast together