Lead Data Scientist
About The Position
Forward Financing is a financial technology company based in Boston, Massachusetts with team members throughout the United States, Dominican Republic, and Canada. The company is on a mission to unlock the capital that fuels small businesses across America. Recognized as a Best Place to Work by Built In Boston and certified as a Great Place To Work®, Forward is investing in its employees, technology, and customer experience – with long-term success in mind every step of the way. We are seeking a Lead Data Scientist to drive end-to-end data science initiatives, transforming complex data into strategic decisions and automated solutions across the organization. You will operate at the intersection of high-level technical execution and cross-functional business partnership, building and scaling advanced analytical solutions that deliver measurable impact across all business domains at Forward Financing.
Requirements
- 8+ years of hands-on model development and deployment experience using advanced statistical and machine learning techniques such as generalized linear models, gradient boosting and deep learning
- Deep experience in building and deploying credit risk models, especially underwriting models, in the fintech, lending or financial services industry is highly preferred.
- Experience with real-time models, decisioning engines, and production-grade machine learning pipelines is preferred.
- Expert in Python, SQL and Git
- Experience with workflow orchestration tools, such as Metaflow is preferred
- Experience deploying and managing models within a cloud platform (AWS, Sagemaker)
- Strong foundation in statistics and machine learning, and knowledge of experimental design
- Excellent project management and communication skills
- Strong critical thinking and problem-solving ability
- Bachelor's degree in Financial/Apfplied Math, Operations Research, Economics, and/or Statistics. Masters/PhD is a plus.
Nice To Haves
- cloud data warehouses (e.g. Snowflake, Databricks), Arize, Metaflow, Sagemaker, decision engines (e.g. Taktile), feature stores (e.g. Tecton)
Responsibilities
- Design, develop and deploy advanced statistical or machine learning models for credit risk, pricing, collections, fraud, and other high-impact business use cases that drive better data-driven decisions
- Lead end-to-end delivery of data science initiatives from problem framing and model design through deployment, monitoring and ongoing maintenance
- Partner with cross-functional teams including Portfolio Strategy, Engineering, Product, Underwriting, Sales and Collections to integrate models into our applications, and proactively identify and solve problems in critical business areas
- Define and set standards for model development, code quality, and documentation; guide technical design decisions across the team
- Act as a technical mentor to team members, fostering a culture of continuous learning and rigorous analytical standards
- Communicate complex technical concepts and business implications to both technical and non-technical stakeholders
- Build and maintain production machine learning pipelines and monitoring systems to ensure models are reliable, scalable and continuously improving
Benefits
- medical, dental, vision, commuter benefits, a flexible time-off policy, paid parental leave, 401k match for US employees, wellness reimbursement, volunteering days, annual professional development budget, and charitable donation match
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Mid Level
