Head of Data Science - Fraud Insights
About the role
Socure is building the identity trust infrastructure for the digital economy — verifying 100% of good identities in real time and stopping fraud before it starts. The mission is big, the problems are complex, and the impact is felt by businesses, governments, and millions of people every day. We hire people who want that level of responsibility. People who move fast, think critically, act like owners, and care deeply about solving customer problems with precision.
What You'll Do
Own the Research Agenda
Bring the rigor of an applied economist to fraud — proper identification strategies, causal inference, and natural experiments. Design studies and analytical frameworks that produce findings you can stand behind publicly.
Answer questions like: What drove the surge in synthetic identity fraud post-CARES Act? How do adversarial networks respond to model updates? What are the second-order effects of regulatory changes on fraud displacement across verticals?
Turn the Identity Graph Into Intelligence
Work across Socure's global identity graph to surface fraud rings, adversarial coalitions, emerging attack typologies, and behavioral shifts before they become industry crises.
Bridge the Outside World to Internal Models
Serve as the connective tissue between external signals — regulatory guidance, legislative changes, CFPB and FinCEN trends, macroeconomic shifts that alter fraud incentives, emerging typologies from industry consortia — and Socure's internal research, modeling, and product roadmaps.
Build & Lead a World-Class Team
Create a culture where intellectual curiosity, methodological discipline, and external credibility are the standard. Recruit, mentor, and develop a team of researchers, data scientists, and analysts who share your appetite for rigor and storytelling.
Drive Go-to-Market Differentiation
Collaborate with Marketing and Growth to develop research-backed thought leadership that strengthens Socure's brand recognition, supports pipeline generation, and reinforces market leadership.
What You Bring
Research Depth & Econometric Rigor
You approach fraud data the way a serious economist approaches a policy question — with proper identification strategies, an appreciation for confounding, a healthy skepticism of naive correlations, and the discipline to distinguish causation from coincidence.
Comfortable with panel data methods, diff-in-diff, regression discontinuity, survival analysis, network econometrics, and the full toolkit of applied causal inference.
Deep Fraud Domain Expertise
You've spent meaningful time in the trenches — synthetic identity, first-party fraud, account takeover, bust-out rings, AML-adjacent typologies, mule networks, or related domains. You understand the adversarial game theory at play and respect the sophistication of the actors on the other side.
Data Fluency at Scale
You've worked with large-scale identity, behavioral, or transaction datasets. You understand graph structures, feature engineering at the identity level, and the operational realities of productionizing insights.
Conversant in Python, SQL, graph analytics, and ML frameworks.
External Credibility & Presence
You have a track record of representing an organization publicly and credibly — major conference appearances, regulatory working groups, authored research the market takes seriously, or a reputation that precedes you in the fraud and identity space.
Executive Communication Without Dumbing It Down
You can write a 2-page brief for a CEO that captures all the important nuance, and go 10 levels deep with a PhD data scientist without losing them. You know the difference between simplifying and falsifying, and you never do the latter.
Regulatory & Macro-Intelligence Fluency
You follow the regulatory environment governing identity verification, fraud prevention, and consumer financial protection (CFPB, FinCEN, OCC, state AGs) and understand how policy changes alter fraud incentives and attack surfaces.