Senior Data Scientist, Detection

About the role

Cloudflare’s Engineering Team is home to some of the industry’s top engineers, dedicated to building and scaling innovative software that handles a huge proportion of the Internet. Our Detection department sits at the heart of that mission: we identify automated, fraudulent, and malicious activity across the Internet and through our gateway.

Responsibilities

• Research, design, and evaluate detection models that identify automated, fraudulent, and malicious activity across Internet-scale data.
• Dig into massive datasets to uncover the patterns and behaviors that distinguish adversaries from legitimate users.
• Define how detection success is measured, designing metrics and evaluation strategies for problems where ground truth is noisy, delayed, or contested.
• Stay current on emerging AI/ML research and evaluate how new techniques (e.g., LLMs, generative AI) can be applied to our products.
• Partner with ML Engineers, Data Engineers, and Product to take detection approaches from research to production and measure their real-world impact.

Requirements

Desirable Skills, Knowledge, And Experience

• Fraud and bots at scale. You have experience across fraud, abuse, and/or bot detection on large, high-velocity traffic. You may focus on one, but you transfer instincts between them.
• Strong fundamentals, fluent in data. You have solid applied statistics, machine learning, and AI methodology fundamentals. You choose the right technique for the problem, and are fluent with large-scale data.
• You have at least 5-7 years of experience professionally working in Data Science, ML Engineering, or Software Engineering.
• You are very comfortable with Python & SQL in production environments.

Benefits

Compensation

Estimated annual salary of $185,000 - $231,000. Equity This role is eligible to participate in Cloudflare’s equity plan.

Benefits

• Health & Welfare Benefits
• Financial Benefits
• Time Off

What Makes Cloudflare Special?

• Project Galileo: Since 2014, we've equipped more than 2,400 journalism and civil society organizations in 111 countries with powerful tools to defend themselves against attacks that would otherwise censor their work, technology already used by Cloudflare’s enterprise customers--at no cost.
• Athenian Project: In 2017, we created the Athenian Project to ensure that state and local governments have the highest level of protection and reliability for free, so that their constituents have access to election information and voter registration. Since the project, we've provided services to more than 425 local government election websites in 33 states.
• 1.1.1.1: We released 1.1.1.1 to help fix the foundation of the Internet by building a faster, more secure and privacy-centric public DNS resolver. This is available publicly for everyone to use - it is the first consumer-focused service Cloudflare has ever released.