Senior Data Scientist - Credit & Risk

About the role

Yonder, a credit or debit rewards card, is looking for a Senior Data Scientist to build the predictive models behind its key decisions. The role is hands-on and individual contributor, reporting directly to the CRO who owns Risk and Analytics. It covers credit acquisition, portfolio management, collections, fraud and rewards, and takes models from hypothesis through to production.

Key responsibilities

• Build acquisition models using bureau, application and alternative data to assess applicant risk, affordability and expected customer value.
• Build behavioural models for portfolio management to help the credit strategy team improve credit profitability.
• Build collections models to identify which interventions work best for members.
• Work with the Fraud and Financial Crime team to detect suspicious behaviour earlier and reduce friction for genuine members.
• Work with AI engineers to use member data to surface the right reward at the right time.
• Own the modelling lifecycle: data exploration, feature engineering, training, validation, implementation, monitoring and explaining results to non-technical stakeholders.
• Look for additional internal signals, bureau attributes and external data sources to improve predictions.
• Help set modelling standards, tooling and experimentation practices.

Required profile

• Has built predictive models that were deployed and improved risk, revenue, customer experience or operations.
• Comfortable with Python and SQL, working directly with large, messy datasets.
• Understands logistic regression, gradient boosting and proper evaluation (calibration, stability, drift).
• Thinks commercially as well as statistically, and can explain models simply to non-technical audiences.
• Experience in consumer lending, credit cards, fraud or fintech is valuable, especially with bureau data, behavioural credit models, collections, transaction data, fraud detection or recommendation systems.