Forward Deployed Data Scientist

Sift • ,

1d • $170,000 - $230,000

About The Position

We’re people that are passionate about making the internet a safer and more trusted place for all. We love the fraud and trust & safety space and want to teach companies how they can protect themselves, their users and create frictionless experiences for legitimate consumers. As a Forward Deployed Engineer, Trust and Safety, you are heavily experienced in detecting and acting on multiple types of online abuse from a technical and quantitative perspective. You’ve helped build tools, models and detection platforms at companies that have had to work through these threats at a global level.

Requirements

• 5–8 years in fraud, trust & safety, risk, or a closely related technical domain - you've spent meaningful time working with fraud data, not just adjacent to it
• Strong SQL and Python skills; you reach for code to answer a question, not to build a pipeline
• Strong understanding of ML concepts applied to fraud: classification models, feature engineering, precision/recall tradeoffs, threshold calibration, score drift
• Experience analyzing large-scale behavioral or transactional datasets to find patterns and anomalies - you know what a fraud ring looks like in the data, not just in a textbook
• Ability to communicate technical findings to both technical and non-technical stakeholders; you can write a forensic investigation report and present it to a VP of Risk in the same week
• Customer-facing experience; you understand that different businesses have different priorities, and that listening before optimizing is part of the job

Nice To Haves

• Hands-on experience with fraud detection platforms (in house or 3rd party)
• Hands-on experience building with AI: LLM APIs, prompt engineering, or agentic workflows - whether that's automating an investigation step, building a tool that surfaces patterns from raw data, or wiring together a multi-step agent to accelerate fraud analysis
• Familiarity with real-time event processing systems
• Experience with rules-based decisioning systems alongside ML - knowing when a hard rule beats a model score
• Background in payments, e-commerce, fintech, marketplace, or account security fraud
• Prior forward deployed, staff engineering, or embedded consulting experience at a technical product company
• Computer Science, Mathematics, Statistics, Information Systems, Economics degree or equivalent

Responsibilities

• Work with our Trust and Safety Architect and Data Science teams to surface emerging fraud patterns across the network escalate and proactively take them down.
• Detect patterns and turn those findings into sharper signals, tighter configurations, and smarter decisioning logic.
• Work across different verticals and closely with customers, partners and prospects with different risk appetites - some optimizing for approval rates, some minimizing chargebacks, some fighting account takeover and other types of abuse.
• Help build dashboards, tune models, decision logic and custom signals to help customers achieve their desired business outcomes
• Identify sources of false positives, possible coverage gaps and other vulnerabilities by digging into raw event streams; form a hypothesis, design a test and implement the fix
• Lead forensic investigations during fraud spikes: trace attack patterns to their source, identify the technique being used, deliver a clear writeup with remediation steps
• Distinguish between one-off anomalies and systemic gaps that indicate a product opportunity - and advocate for the latter with rigor
• Contribute to detection frameworks, investigative tooling, and internal playbooks that make every engineer and analyst at Sift more effective
• Be the conduit between customer reality and internal roadmap; your field observations should directly accelerate what Sift ships next

Benefits

• At Sift, we are intentionally building a diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplace. We believe that diversity drives innovation, equity is a fundamental right, and inclusion is a basic human need. We envision a place where all Sifties feel secure sharing their authentic selves and diverse experiences with their teams, their customers, and their community – ultimately using this empowerment and authenticity to build trust and create a safer Internet.

What This Job Offers

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