Risk Data Scientist

About the Role

Forward processes payments for thousands of merchants across dozens of partner platforms.

The Risk Data Scientist's job is to build the model-driven intelligence layer that replaces static rules with adaptive, evidence-based decisioning across three risk domains: merchant underwriting and approval optimization, real-time transaction fraud and anomaly detection, and AML/transaction monitoring and SAR prioritization. You will own the full modeling lifecycle - from problem framing and feature engineering to training, validation, deployment, monitoring, and regulatory governance.

This is applied ML in a high-stakes, regulated financial context. Models you build will directly determine approval rates, fraud loss rates, chargeback exposure, and SAR filing quality. They will be scrutinized by bank sponsors, card networks, and regulators. The work demands both technical rigor and regulatory fluency: someone who understands why a gradient boosting ensemble outperforms logistic regression on imbalanced fraud data AND why SHAP explainability is a compliance requirement under ECO