Machine Learning Lead

About the role

Coinflow is seeking a Machine Learning Lead to own the fraud and risk intelligence layer at the core of our platform. This is a founding ML role. You'll lead our first dedicated ML team, building capabilities that combine our first-party transaction data with partner signals to optimize approval rates across payment methods and geographies, sharpen risk decisioning during merchant underwriting, and improve fraud detection across global payment methods.

Key Responsibilities

• Strengthen Coinflow's fraud detection and risk decisioning capabilities — feature engineering, model development, and production deployment
• Own the full model lifecycle: experimentation, evaluation, monitoring, and iteration
• Define and track core fraud and risk metrics — detection rate, false positive rate, chargeback rate, dispute win rate — and continuously improve them
• Explore transaction and behavioral data to surface new fraud signals and emerging attack patterns
• Partner with Engineering, Product, and Operations to embed fraud intelligence directly into payment flows and internal tooling
• Integrate and orchestrate external fraud/risk partners, getting maximum value from their tooling
• Establish the foundation for ML and data practices across the company
• Help shape Coinflow's long-term fraud, risk, and ML roadmap

Required Qualifications

• 5+ years in machine learning, applied data science, or production ML roles
• Demonstrated experience building fraud models in payments, with direct exposure to the acquiring side — acquirer, PSP, or payment facilitator
• Proven track record taking ML projects from proof-of-concept to fully deployed, productionized systems
• Deep familiarity with acquiring-side fraud dynamics: authorization fraud, card-not-present fraud, friendly fraud, chargeback patterns, and merchant risk
• Strong foundation in ML, statistics, and feature engineering on high-volume financial data
• Comfortable owning ambiguous problems end-to-end and creating structure where none exists
• Strong collaborator across Engineering, Product, and Ops

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience at an acquirer, ISO, PayFac, or payments infrastructure company
• Experience developing, managing, and scaling MLOps pipelines and monitoring systems (retraining schedules, real-time performance metrics)
• Familiarity with card network rules, dispute/chargeback workflows, and fraud liability frameworks
• Experience as an early or sole ML hire at a startup
• Exposure to real-time or near-real-time fraud scoring systems
• Experience with stablecoin, crypto, or alternative payment rails

What we offer

• Competitive compensation including base salary, performance bonus, and meaningful ownership
• Opportunity to build the fraud and risk intelligence layer of a rapidly scaling fintech company
• Collaborative and innovative work environment with world-class investors
• Direct impact on core risk infrastructure and company trajectory during a hyper growth phase
• The base salary range for this role is $175,000 to $235,000 USD. The actual base salary offered depends on a variety of factors, including but not limited to experience, education, skills, qualifications and business needs.
• You will also have access to a wide array of benefits, including health and wellness benefits, 401(k) savings plan, and flexible time off