Head of Machine Learning - Application Fraud

SentiLink provides innovative identity and risk solutions, empowering institutions and individuals to transact with confidence. We’re building the future of identity verification in the United States, replacing a clunky, ineffective, and expensive status quo with solutions that are 10x faster, smarter, and more accurate. Our real-time APIs have helped verify hundreds of millions of identities, starting with financial services and rapidly expanding into new markets. SentiLink is backed by world-class investors including Craft Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, NYCA, and Max Levchin. We support a variety of ways to work, ranging from fully remote to in-office, with physical offices in Austin, San Francisco, New York City, Seattle, Los Angeles, Chicago, Gurugram (Delhi), and Bengaluru.

About the role

As Head of Machine Learning, Application Fraud at SentiLink, you will directly manage a team of talented data scientists building our suite of products: models that identify fraudsters and advance our growing suite of financial risk products. You will act as a technical leader, mentor, and owner of your domain, guiding your team to deliver high-impact solutions. This role requires managing full-stack data scientists whose work involves model development, analysis, and writing production code. You should share this skillset and be interested in end-to-end ownership in a fast-moving environment where deep domain understanding drives development.

Responsibilities

• Directly manage a team of highly skilled data scientists, starting from 2-3 and growing to 5-6.
• Act as a technical mentor, providing detailed direction and diving deep into technical challenges.
• Lead planning, resourcing, and communications with senior leadership, product, and engineering teams.
• Develop strong business intuition and guide your team to deliver performant data science solutions on aggressive timelines.
• Develop and maintain SentiLink’s fraud detection models through the full model development lifecycle: from data acquisition and featurization to model training, experimentation, productionalization, and monitoring.
• Research new types of fraud and develop new SentiLink products around identity verification.
• Achieve success through iteration, integration of new data sources, and inventive feature engineering.
• Write production-ready code that supports real-time decision-making by our partners.
• Design, perform, and present analyses to inform data acquisition, product development, risk operations, marketing, and sales efforts.

Requirements

• 10+ years of relevant work experience with a relevant Master’s degree, or 7+ years with a relevant PhD.
• 2-5 years of experience directly managing a team of data scientists, ideally in a startup environment.
• 3+ years of startup experience.
• Excellent communicator and team player.
• Proven track record of solving complex or high-profile business problems with data science or machine learning solutions.
• Experience communicating outcomes and progress to senior management and stakeholders.
• Strong in “end-to-end” data science development: planning, defining success criteria, securing buy-in, developing, and delivering solutions (production, decks, strategy docs, etc.).
• Strong practical ML and statistics knowledge, with the ability to employ standard tools to scope solutions and double down where needed. Experience with state-of-the-art ML solutions is a plus.
• Interest in developing deep domain expertise for product-focused work; a background in fraud is not required, but willingness to learn is.
• Experience writing production code and tests.
• Detail-oriented and thoughtful—someone we can rely on to make business-changing decisions.
• Thrive in a fast-paced environment characterized by varied, high-impact, open-ended problems.
• Bonus for familiarity with identity solutions, fintech, or adjacent industries.
• Must be legally authorized to work in the United States and must live in the United States.

Technologies

• Python 3
• PostgreSQL
• AWS infrastructure (EC2, S3, RDS, Redshift, etc.)

Pay

$210,000–$260,000/year + equity + benefits

Benefits

• Employer-paid group health insurance for you and your dependents.
• 401(k) plan with employer match (or equivalent for non-U.S.-based roles).
• Flexible paid time off.
• Regular company-wide in-person events.
• Home office stipend, and more.

Corporate Values

• Follow Through
• Deep Understanding
• Whatever It Takes
• Do Something Smart