Senior Data Scientist
About The Position
Kikoff is a profitable, pre-IPO fintech company focused on empowering financial security. We are experiencing significant revenue growth and have a unicorn valuation. Our mission is to help millions of people build credit, access liquidity, and save money. This role is for a Senior Data Scientist to join our data science team, which is part of a larger Data organization of approximately 20 people. You will be embedded in Kikoff's core credit-building products, working alongside marketing data scientists and data engineers. The data science team's objective is to ensure Kikoff products make a clear promise to customers, deliver on it reliably, and generate sustainable business value fairly. This role will lead a product area as its data lead, collaborating with product, engineering, design, and lifecycle marketing leads. Additionally, you will help set technical direction and best practices for data science across Kikoff, including experimentation, AI product evaluation, and workflow integration with AI agents.
Requirements
- Experience partnering with product, engineering, and marketing peers across strategy, goal setting, approach, and execution.
- A track record of defining metrics from scratch and driving team adoption.
- Experience designing and running experimentation programs, including those with challenges in clean randomization.
- Comfort with quasi-experimental and causal inference methods and their limitations.
- Hands-on proficiency with production-quality SQL and Python for building pipelines, analyses, and models.
- Experience building or working closely with models that drive product decisions (e.g., ranking, fraud, forecasting, personalization, underwriting, detection, LLM applications).
- Demonstrated use of AI tools in daily analytical work, showing improvements in speed and quality.
- Ability to drive decisions with data in front of senior audiences, even when data contradicts a plan.
Nice To Haves
- Experience building or running an evaluation program for an LLM-based product.
- Consumer fintech experience, particularly with products serving un- and under-banked customers.
- Experience building an experimentation or causal inference practice in an organization.
- Experience taking a model from proof of concept to production, or shipping challenger models that influenced product decisions.
- Experience mentoring, onboarding, or managing other data scientists.
Responsibilities
- Lead the data work for a core Kikoff product area, including setting questions, building evidence, and driving subsequent actions.
- Define and maintain the measurement system for your product area across the entire customer journey (activation, engagement, credit outcomes, retention, revenue, unit economics).
- Contribute to the Kikoff-wide measurement framework.
- Own product experimentation for your area: design, guardrails, analysis, and rollout recommendations, including complex cases.
- Own evaluation for AI product surfaces: define 'good' in measurable terms, build and validate automated scorers, and ensure product quality through regression tests.
- Build and evaluate models where appropriate, including proof-of-concept and challenger models, offline evaluation, threshold decisions, and production monitoring.
- Partner with product, engineering, design, and lifecycle marketing leads on roadmap and objectives.
- Review work, onboard new teammates, and mentor junior data scientists.
Benefits
- Competitive salary
- Equity
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
