Senior Staff Data Scientist

About Us:
DailyPay is transforming the way people get paid. As a worktech company and the industrys leading on demand pay solution DailyPay uses an award-winning technology platform to help Americas top employers build stronger relationships with their employees. This voluntary employee benefit enables workers everywhere to feel more motivated to work harder and stay longer on the job while supporting their financial well-being outside of the workplace.
DailyPay is headquartered in New York City with operations throughout the United States as well as in Belfast. For more information visit DailyPays Press Center.

DailyPay is seeking a Senior Staff Data Scientist to serve as the technical architect and strategic leader for our Personalization & AI Platform domains. This is one of the most technically senior and strategically influential roles in our data organization at the intersection of user experience financial modeling and AI infrastructure.

You will architect the systems that make every DailyPay product interaction smarter - from how we optimize financial decisions for workers to how we personalize communications to how we protect members from fraud. Equally important you will lay the data infrastructure and process foundations that enable your team and the broader data science function to operate with speed rigor and scale.

This role requires someone who can move fluidly between writing production-grade model code architecting scalable systems partnering strategically with Product and Engineering leadership and raising the technical bar of everyone around them.

Personalization Architecture & ML Platforms

• Architect and own end-to-end ML systems for personalizing the user experience including on-demand pay balance optimization

• Design and deploy content personalization systems including email content ranking in-app experience sequencing and offer relevance

• Lead the transition from offline batch scoring to real-time low-latency inference pipelines embedded directly in product backends

• Establish the data infrastructure foundation the data science team requires: feature stores training pipelines labeling systems data contracts and monitoring frameworks

• Define and enforce data quality standards; design automated validation and alerting pipelines that protect downstream model and business health implement CI/CD best practices for ML

Technical Strategy & Cross-Domain Influence

• Partner directly with product and engineering leads to identify and quantify high-value AI opportunities and translate ambiguous business problems into multi-quarter technical roadmaps

• Communicate complex technical outcomes to executive stakeholders as concrete strategic recommendations grounded in business impact and financial metrics

Mentorship & Organizational Excellence

• Serve as the primary technical leader for a growing data science team setting the technical direction establishing standards and mentoring data scientists at all levels through design reviews architectural guidance and code reviews

• Cultivate a culture of rigor curiosity and operational excellence; establish documented standardized patterns that make the entire team more effective

• Drive cross-functional alignment on DS/AI success metrics ensuring model performance is durably connected to measurable business outcomes

• Establish team norms and a shared framework for effectively and responsibly applying modern AI; setting expectations around when and how to use AI tools how to evaluate their outputs and how to maintain rigor as capabilities evolve rapidly

Experience

• Advanced degree in a quantitative discipline (e.g. computer science machine learning data science engineering) with 10 years of industry experience in data science and machine learning

• Demonstrated history of architecting and deploying production ML systems that drive significant measurable business ROI preferably across multiple product domains

• Experience in fintech payments consumer financial products or similar regulated domains strongly preferred

Technical Mastery

• Model & Decision Development: Expert-level proficiency across modern AI classical ML models probabilistic methods optimization techniques and causal inference; strong track record of translating business objectives into model strategy

• Model & Decision Production Systems: Deep expertise in end-to-end production deployment to engineering standards - data pipeline development model observability monitoring drift detection latency/cost tradeoffs incident response and rollback planning

Strategic & Leadership Skills

• Strategic Business Impact: Proven ability to identify where DS/AI creates competitive advantage prioritize the DS/AI roadmap across product areas and communicate model performance in terms of business outcomes to senior leadership

• Organizational Leadership: Experience coaching and mentoring senior ICs; ability to shape team technical direction and help build a culture of rigor and inclusion

• Scaling DS/AI: Actively follows emerging AI research tools and frameworks; contributes to the long-term AI/ML capability roadmap; balances stakeholder work new development and technical debt

Mindset

• Force Multiplier: You are not satisfied when only your own work is excellent; you invest in the tools standards and people that make the team around you better and measure your impact accordingly

• Technically decisive: You form strong opinions from evidence and defend them clearly to an engineer debating architecture a product manager weighing tradeoffs or an executive asking what to bet on

• Operators instinct: You have seen what happens when a great model meets a poorly designed production system and build with that lesson baked in thinking about monitoring failure modes and retraining before the first line of model code is written

• Exceptional health vision and dental care

• Opportunity for equity ownership

• Life and AD&D short- and long-term disability

• Employee Assistance Program

• Employee Resource Groups

• Fun company outings and events

• Unlimited PTO

• 401K with company match

High-performing cultures arent built in silos they thrive on partnership. At DailyPay we Commit Together to an inclusive professional environment where multifaceted perspectives are our greatest competitive advantage. We recognize that our team members dont live single-issue lives and we lean into the wide-ranging backgrounds and life stages that sharpen our collective decision-making.

In our high-trust environment we empower you to Challenge Norms. Weve created a space where it is safe to ask difficult questions disrupt the status quo and share bold perspectives without fear of professional fallout. We believe that by checking our own assumptions and staying curious about the experiences of others we arrive at better more innovative results.

We provide the space for you to do your best work through peer advocacy and transparent career development. If you are looking for a culture that values intellectual honesty celebrates the unique lived experiences of its people and thrives on collective success youll find it here.

If you require reasonable accommodation for any aspect of the recruitment process please send a request to . All requests for accommodation will be addressed as confidentially as practicable.

DailyPay is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration without regard to race color religion or creed alienage or citizenship status political affiliation marital or partnership status age national origin ancestry physical or mental disability medical condition veteran status gender gender identity pregnancy childbirth (or related medical conditions) sex sexual orientation sexual and other reproductive health decisions genetic disorder genetic predisposition carrier status military status familial status or domestic violence victim status and any other basis protected under federal state or local laws.

Required Experience:

Staff IC