Senior Applied Data Scientist

If you can send your friends money in seconds, why does it still take your employer two weeks to send your paycheck? At Clair, we are on a mission to create financial freedom for America's workers by giving them a digital banking platform that allows them to get paid as soon as they clock out of work. We meet Americans at their place of work by embedding our products within the scheduling, workforce management, and payroll apps they already use every day.

About the role

As an Applied Data Scientist on Clair’s Data Science team, you’ll be responsible for developing and maintaining the next generation of credit models and predictive systems that power Clair’s financial products. You’ll shape how millions of hourly workers access affordable credit, leveraging cutting-edge data science to assess risk, predict repayment, and optimize credit decisions. This role blends credit modeling with feature engineering — from designing new model features (including predictive features) based on user transaction data to deploying and monitoring production-ready ML models that drive critical product decisions.

Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain credit risk and repayment models that directly power Clair’s underwriting and decision systems.
• Design and engineer predictive features using transaction-level data, including the prediction of user income flows, spending, and repayment behaviors.
• Collaborate with engineering teams to deploy, monitor, and optimize models in production environments using AWS and Snowflake ML Platform.
• Build prototypes of new modeling methodologies and present them to stakeholders for evaluation and feedback.
• Investigate and analyze credit performance, identifying root causes of model drift or unexpected repayment behavior.
• Partner cross-functionally with product, risk, and engineering teams to turn data insights into product improvements and credit strategy refinements.
• Communicate technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Stay current on best practices and emerging techniques in credit modeling, explainable AI, and financial ML systems.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of professional experience in data science and machine learning.
• Proven track record of leading end-to-end data science projects — from research and model development to deployment and monitoring.
• Experience building and productionizing credit or risk assessment models.
• Strong proficiency in Python and familiarity with modern ML libraries (TensorFlow, PyTorch, XGBoost, etc.).
• Strong command of SQL and experience working with large transactional and time-series datasets.
• Strong communication skills and ability to translate complex findings into actionable insights.
• Experience working with cross-functional teams in a fast-paced production environment.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in fintech or credit risk modeling.
• Experience with cloud-based machine learning environments (AWS, Azure, Snowflake ML Platform, etc.).
• Familiarity with model explainability techniques and compliance requirements in financial modeling.
• Experience working with time-series analysis and modeling, including forecasting, trend detection, and temporal feature engineering.

Additional Details

This is a hybrid position based in New York City; you will be expected to come into the office at least three days a week (Tuesdays, Wednesdays, & Thursdays), with additional days on occasion for client meetings.

Pay

The annual base salary for this role is $190,000-$200,000. The base pay is determined using many factors, such as education, skills, and experience, and is reflective of Clair Series stage and size. Base pay is only one part of Clair’s competitive total compensation package, which includes equity, benefits, and additional perks.

Benefits

• Medical, Dental, & Vision Coverage, with option to extend to your family
• Fully-paid parental leave
• Company-sponsored 401k, HSA, and FSA
• Unlimited vacation for salaried roles, generous PTO for hourly roles
• Work from home setup allowance
• Access to your earnings every day on Clair
• Company-sponsored short-term and long-term disability insurance