Senior Data Scientist, Detection
About The Position
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. We develop advanced detection systems and machine learning models that operate at scale, collaborating with Product and Engineering teams across the company to protect our customers and stay ahead of the constantly evolving threat landscape.
Requirements
- 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.
Nice To Haves
- At home in ground truth ambiguity. Building detections when ground truth is scarce is the heart of this job. You make real progress with weak, delayed, or absent labels and you're energized by adversaries that fight back.
- You don't burn signals. You understand (or are curious to learn) how to act on detections without tipping your hand, knowing that how you deploy and respond can erode your future visibility.
- Pragmatic about complexity. You know when a simple solution beats a complex one, and you don't chase small gains at disproportionate cost.
- Disciplined in code. You apply strong programming and engineering best practices in both research and production code.
- Impact-driven and clear. You connect your work to business impact and communicate clearly across technical and non-technical stakeholders.
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.
Benefits
- Medical/Rx Insurance
- Dental Insurance
- Vision Insurance
- Flexible Spending Accounts
- Commuter Spending Accounts
- Fertility & Family Forming Benefits
- On-demand mental health support and Employee Assistance Program
- Global Travel Medical Insurance
- Short and Long Term Disability Insurance
- Life & Accident Insurance
- 401(k) Retirement Savings Plan
- Employee Stock Participation Plan
- Flexible paid time off covering vacation and sick leave
- Leave programs, including parental, pregnancy health, medical, and bereavement leave
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
