Financial Crimes Data Scientist

East West Bank • Pasadena, CA

2d

About The Position

East West Bank, a premier financial institution with over 110 locations across the U.S. and Asia, is seeking a Financial Crimes Data Scientist. This role focuses on developing, deploying, and optimizing in-house Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and fraud detection models. The position leverages machine learning, network analytics, and large-scale financial data to identify emerging threats, enhance detection effectiveness, reduce false positives, and support regulatory compliance within financial crime risk programs. East West Bank is known for its strong foundation, enterprising spirit, and commitment to absolute integrity, providing associates with opportunities for career advancement.

Requirements

• Knowledge of statistical programming languages like R, Python, and database query languages like SQL, Hive, Pig is desirable.
• Familiarity with Scala, Java, or C++ is an added advantage.
• Good applied statistical skills, including knowledge of statistical tests, behavior clustering, distributions, regression, maximum likelihood estimators, etc.
• Proficiency in statistics is essential for data-driven companies.
• Understanding the fundamentals of Multivariable Calculus and Linear Algebra is important as they form the basis of a lot of predictive performance or algorithm optimization techniques.
• Proficiency in handling imperfections in data is an important aspect of a data scientist job description.
• Experience with Data Visualization Tools like Tableau and Power BI that help to visually encode data.
• Network/Link Analytics.
• Excellent Communication Skills – it is incredibly important to describe findings to a technical and non-technical audience.
• Strong Software Engineering Background.
• Hands-on experience with data science tools.
• Problem-solving aptitude.
• Analytical mind and great business sense.
• Applicants must have legal authorization to work in the United States. We do not offer visa sponsorship at this time.

Nice To Haves

• Core Expertise in Financial Crime Risk Management
• AML/BSA Compliance
• Fraud Analytics
• Machine Learning & AI
• Graph and Network Analytics
• Entity Resolution
• Transaction Monitoring
• Model Development & Deployment
• Python, SQL, Spark, Databricks
• Cloud Analytics Platforms (Azure/AWS)

Responsibilities

• Develops, validates, and deploys advanced analytics and machine learning solutions to detect, prevent, and investigate financial crimes, including money laundering, fraud, sanctions violations, and terrorist financing.
• Designs, builds, validates, and deploys in-house detection models for AML, fraud, and other financial crime risks.
• Develops risk-scoring, anomaly detection, predictive, and network analytics models using internal and external data sources.
• Creates and optimizes transaction monitoring scenarios and machine learning-driven alert generation frameworks.
• Implements model deployment pipelines and production monitoring to ensure effectiveness and regulatory compliance.
• Conducts feature engineering, model tuning, and performance assessment to improve precision, recall, and operational efficiency.
• Partners with Compliance, BSA/AML, Fraud, Investigations, and Technology teams to translate emerging risks into scalable detection strategies.
• Reduces false positives while increasing the identification of high-risk activity and suspicious behavior.
• Supports model governance, validation, documentation, and regulatory examinations.
• Performs other duties as assigned.

Benefits

• Sustained growth and expertise in industries like real estate, entertainment and media, private equity and venture capital, and high-tech help build sustainable businesses and expand our associates’ potential for career advancement.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed